


Negotiations

by PornAccount



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Begging, Blow Jobs, Bondage, F/M, Femdom, Graphic Violence, Intrigue, Light BDSM, Orgasm Delay/Denial, PWP slowly gaining a plot, Politics, Porn, Rimming, Shaving, now with plot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-08
Updated: 2017-07-16
Packaged: 2018-09-22 22:17:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 30,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9627755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PornAccount/pseuds/PornAccount
Summary: Percy’s side of the bed is empty, again. The hour of the wolf has come and gone and the castle lies still and dark, it’s moonlit corridors cold and empty.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my porn account, as the name implies. It’s primary function is to give me an outlet for things I would be too embarrassed to admit to, even in an online account I might otherwise use. You should except me to dress in a clown costume and roll around in the rotten fish and feces my Id vomits up from the dungeon dimension of my psyche. If you are not up for that, the back button is up and to your left. As I side note I also might use it to take story concepts out for a test drive and/or doodle hints of plot around my porn.
> 
> Unbetaed, but if anyone feels the urge to read corrections for several thousand words of very graphic porn, let me know.
> 
> Amendment: The above part is still true, but the random kinky sex, unexpectedly sprouted something resembling a plot. If you want to avoid the graphic fucking, you can move ahead to chapter 3 and not miss too much.

Percy’s side of the bed is empty, again. The hour of the wolf has come and gone and the castle lies still and dark, it’s moonlit corridors cold and empty. The stone tiles are cold beneath her bare feet when she steps up to the corridor window. A million stars are blazing in the night sky above, below the watch fires on the walls are burning low. There is light in the kitchens, where the bakers have already begun their day, and in the top windows of the old keep.  
  
Vex sighs quietly and pads down the silent stone halls. Percy’s office is on the top floor, above the old great hall, where two dozen clerks and engineers work on furthering Whitestone’s prosperity. The archives and offices are dark and still now, bureaus and writing desks and filing cabinets of black oak wood forming dark shapes in the twilight of her dark vision, but a glimmer of light is visible beneath Percy’s door.  
  
Vex slips in quietly and finds Percy bowed over the mechanical arithmetic engine with ledgers and letters piled high around him. His cloak hangs over the back of his heavy chair, his shirt sleeves are rolled up, his bare feet tapping a nervous rhythm on the thick rug.  
  
“Still up, dear?”  
  
Percy gives her a guilty smile and rubs his eyes beneath his glasses.  
  
“The new sewage system is behind schedule and if we want to head of the yearly bout of cholera, we need to be ready by the time the spring flood hits. We don’t have enough copper sheeting and we are over budget as it is. I have turned Archibald loose on it, but I’m not entirely certain …”  
  
He isn’t precisely lying to her but she knows his tells well enough by now to glean that he is also trying to hide something behind his words. Something is bothering him.  
  
No matter. She can wait him out until he is ready to talk and right now she has bigger fish to fry.  
  
She shushes him with a finger to his lips.  
  
“Percival. None of that will be helped by you overworking yourself.”  
  
“I need to review the delivery schedule. The last snow storm has been playing merry hell with the road conditions and …”  
  
“And I’ll help you in the morning. Right now you need a bath and some sleep.”  
  
She recognizes the obstinate set of his jaw. It’s time to bring out the heavy ballistae.  
  
“You will be able to serve your people better if you are not cross-eyed and drooling on your papers. And you promised Pike. Six hours of sleep a night. You promised.”  
  
She gently closes her hand around his throat and tilts his head back to stare him down, the specter of Pike’s disapproval backing her up, until she sees the fight leave his eyes.  
  
“Fine. If you are going to be a pest about it, we might as well get it done and over with.” Percy huffs and starts extinguishing the gas lamps lighting his office. She takes his hand and leads him to the private apartments of the royal family.  
  
The enormous ovens in the kitchens and the castle smithy are stocked at all hours of the day and heat a large, copper water tank, providing hot water and heat to the baths, so the stone tiles surrounding the pool are warm and slick beneath her feet. She lights the gas lamps and collects soap, massage oil, shaving cream and razors, while Percy strips.  
  
The warm golden glow of the lamp light paints his pale skin amber and Vex feels a rush of heat in her cheeks, watching him out of the corner of her eye. Blacksmithing and rapier play in the training yard have given him a thin layer of hard muscle, but there are dark bags beneath his eyes and she can count his ribs and the knobs of his spine one by one.  
  
His cock is heavy and pendulous between his legs and she feels the slow heat curling in her belly, the hitch in her breath, her nipples hard and hypersensitive against the silk of her dressing gown.  
  
She is nude beneath the silk, apart from a fine gold chain around her ankle from Pike and an ivory bracelet wrapped around her biceps, which used to belong to her mother.  
  
Years of living as a mercenary and hunter, working with longbow and quarterstaff and short-sword, have left her with wide shoulders and slim muscles in her arms, her belly flat and hard, her perfect bronze skin marred by a dozen faded battle scars.  
  
She moves with a dancer’s easy grace when she slides into the steaming water behind him, hooking her legs around his, spreading them and tilting his head back on her shoulder.  
  
Her hand carefully massages his balls, feeling the prickly stubble on the baby smooth skin.  
  
“Somebody needs a shave.”  
  
She can feel his muscles tense and sucks on his pulse point, making cooing noises. “Sussh, darling. No need to be nervous, I got you.”  
  
“Easy for you to say, you don’t need to mess around with razors next to your delicate bits.”  
  
She brushes a hand over the mirror smooth swell of her prominent venus mons and dips two fingers into her liquid heat, rubbing her scent over his pink mouth.  
  
“Advantages of being a half-elf. Don’t pout, baby-boy. I’ll take good care of you. Relax.”  
  
Her voice becomes throaty and deep, “When we are done, I’m going to please you with my mouth. Would you like that, darling? I’m going to make you feel sooo good.”  
  
She binds his hands above his head with a soft red silk scarf, tying him to the leg of a stone bench at the edge of the pool. Once the last knot is made, golden runes blaze on scarlet silk as the material tightens.  
  
His body is stretched out before her, half submerged into water on the ledge that forms the first step into the pool, beautiful and helpless. A surge of fierce tenderness and lust takes her breath away, as she brushes her hands over pale skin flushed pink by the water’s heat.  
  
“Relax, darling. I’m in charge now. It’s no longer your responsibility or your fault.”  
  
Vex has never meet Percival the elder, knows only the empty sarcophagus down in the crypts, but she can’t help but to hate and admire the man in equal measure. The unrelenting sense of responsibility, the uncompromising dedication to the well-being of his people above all else, which he installed in his son, drives Percy to lean against the world like a blade against the grindstone. It’s a thorn buried in her flesh, but Percy wouldn’t be the same man (brilliant and arrogant, proud and unforgiving against himself and others, cruel and compassionate, intensely, brutally pragmatic) without him.  
  
Whitestone first. Everyone else, most certainly himself, second. _(She lives in dread of the day the interests of her new home and her found family collide.)_  
  
Tying him up, bathing him and shaving his body hair might be an unsubtle way to make him let go of his burdens, to make him set down the cross of responsibility for tens of thousands of lives, if only for a few hours, but it works and, on the plus side, it also happens to make her sex slick and needy with want.  
  
He shifts and twitches in his bonds when she works up a spice scented lather and teases the soft brush across his nipples until they are hard and pointy.  
  
She drags her blunt fingernails over the sensitive skin of his triceps until he shivers under her caress before she lathers up his armpits. She works the razor with infinite patience and care; he still bears the scars that were inflicted on him in the Briarwood’s torture chamber and she would rather cut her own throat then to add to them. She is acutely aware of the privilege, she has been afforded, the trust he is showing her by allowing her this power over him.  
  
She works her way down his torso dusting kisses and light scratches all the way, while he shivers and squirms languidly in his bonds.  
  
His penis is already swollen and wet at the tip when she gets there, rubbing her face along his hardening erection like a friendly cat. Her full lips close over the very head and suck, peeling back his foreskin from his glans.  
  
“Vex …”  
  
She kisses him tenderly on the mouth to shut him up.  
  
“Shush, baby-boy. I didn’t give you permission to speak. Let me. Leave it all to me.”  
  
He does.  
  
She can feel him straining against his bonds but pays him no further mind as she seals her lips around his head and hollows her cheeks until he is hard like an iron bar.  
  
With a wicked grin she crawls up his body and thrusts her breasts in his face as she leans over and goes fishing in the pockets of her dressing gown.  
  
Finally she finds her quarry and pulls a finely forged gold snake from the silk folds of her robe.  
  
“Look what Gilmore made for me, darling.”  
  
She hisses the command word and the cold metal statue comes to live, platinum inlaid runes glowing softly, and slithers down Percy’s chest, carefully coiling around his sex until the skin of his testicles is stretched taut and his penis is hard and straining.  
  
She brushes her lips along the shell of his ear, feels him shiver, flushed pink with the heat of the humid air and want.  
  
“Do you know what it does, baby-boy?” she asks, kissing her way down his neck.  
  
“It prevents you from coming. You will still be able to feel everything. Every kiss and caress, all the heat and needy want, but no relief. After I have cleaned you up, I’ll tie you to the bed until you can do nothing but shiver and cry and beg and then I plan to spend hours with your beautiful penis in my mouth and my tongue in your ass, making you come again and again, only our friend here will prevent it, so you will climb the peak a dozen times but never fall.  
  
Does that sound like fun, darling?”  
  
Percy’s pupils are blown so wide, the black is nearly swallowing the blue and his blush has spread all the way down to his chest and arms. Vex puts her hand on top of his wildly beating heart.  
  
Percy clicks like a steely trading house vault, all complicated brass cogs and steel transmissions and interwoven springs, but she can hear the twang of internal stresses, the fault lines of too many obligations.  
  
No matter, she will put him together right.  
  
But first to take him apart.  
  
She leans forward and whispers into his ear, “If you beg prettily for seven days **and** eat two meals a day **and** sleep at least six hours every night, I’ll consider letting you come, assuming Pike doesn’t object when she is back.”  
  
Her brush teases over his angry red penis, coats his testicle in shaving cream then follows the prominent vein at the bottom of his member to his head. She spends a few minutes with a lazy smile alternating between blowing her hot breath on his glans and swirling the baby-soft brush over it until his breath comes in soft whimpers.  
  
She takes her time with the razor. Not a single nick is permissible; he has too many scars already. When she is done he looks like a slightly underfeed version of the marble statues that line the hallways of the Hall of Whispering Leaves in Syngorn, all smooth white skin and slim muscle.  
  
She feels hot, her skin tender to the touch, fuelled by the dark lust her control of him brings. She wants to make him squirm and beg in breathless need. She needs this power to balance the scales.  
  
She has given her heart too completely, too fully.  
  
(Here is her dirty little secret. His opinion ( _of her_ ) matters and that terrifies her beyond words.)  
  
She is not used to being this vulnerable, has allowed no man power over her, since her brother and she left their father’s house without a backwards glance.  
  
Making him shatter, proofing to herself that he needs (wants) her, that she is worthy of being part of this city and its people, is suddenly the most important thing in the world.  
  
She mounts him quickly, moans brokenly when he slides into her, where she is slick and swollen with want. She rolls her hips, pressing her breasts against the hard planes of Percy’s chest, trying to ignore the bursts of pleasure, blooming in her belly, to take in every detail of his desperation.  
  
“Fight it for me, darling. Try not to come. Please, you are so beautiful and strong, when you suffer for me. Please, fight it, my warrior prince, my darling boy. Don’t come.”  
  
He strains in his bonds and she feels his abdominal muscles flexing as he struggles to do her bidding. She cradles his face in her hands, brushing tears from his cheekbones, while clenching her inner muscles around him.  
  
Kissing him hard and pinching his nipples, finally tips him over the edge. He bucks against her but she keeps his forehead pressed against his, her eyes never leaving his.  
  
All for her. All this want, the beautiful desperation when his pleasure plateaus just shy of completion and slowly decays to squirming, uncomfortable, breathless need, pink lips slightly parted in a silent moan, body undulating in slow sinus waves, water and sweat giving his skin a golden sheen in the lamplight.  
  
She scoops up the memories, guards them jealously, squirrels away every moan and sigh like a brightly colored trinket.  
  
She has always been a greedy girl.  
  
Her sex is sobbing wet mess; the insides of her long thighs are slick and shiny with her juices nearly to her knees. Her clit is swollen and tender to the touch.  
  
She wants to mount him again, grind her stiff pink pearl against his pubic bone with his member filling her deliciously until she comes like a star burst, all radiant fire and fleeting light.  
  
She wants to worm his member in her anus, experience that dark, slow-boiling heat creeping up her spin and filling her chest, reveal in pleasure edged and tempered with pain.  
  
She wants to take him into her mouth and feel his seed pulse on her tongue.  
  
Doing the best to ignore the ache in her empty pussy, she works the soap bar over the pert swells of her breasts instead, teasing small, pink nipples into pointy numbs, works up a lather over the faint ridges of her hard abdomen.  
  
When her body is slippery and gleaming with soap and bubbles, she slides over him, gliding her soapy breasts over his body. She takes her time, washing him, dragging the soft sponge over his armpits and feet and stomach, teasing a gentle finger over his anus. It’s intimate and soft and charged with barely suppressed lust and the way he leans into her, like a sunbathing cat, when she is massaging soap into his scalp, all pink faced and pretty and so young, takes her breath away.  
  
She saves his sex for last. He is tender after an aborted orgasm, shifting in his bonds, when she washes him, with little whimpers, that make her pause and close her eyes, leaning against him, while her pussy clenches hard.  
  
When she is done he is falling asleep in her embrace, hands still tied to the edge of the pool. The hot water is making her drowsy and she doesn’t fancy drowning in her own bath tub, so she ushers Percy out and towels him dry with soft flannel rags.  
  
“Hands crossed behind your back, please, darling.”  
  
She gently cups his testicles and rolls the baby-soft balls between her fingers, then grasps his still hard penis and pulls carefully.  
  
“Let’s go to bed darling boy.”  
  
Percy follows her, still flushed from the heat, until she stops him by tapping him on the nose.  
  
“What are you doing, baby-boy? I walk. Good boys crawl, you know that.”  
  
Percy flushes even brighter, but drops to his knees and follows her on all fours to the door connecting the baths to their private apartments. The fire in the heard has burnt down to embers, so she lights the oil lamps as he climbs on the bed, admiring the firm flesh of his ass and the proud jut of his rigid member.  
  
By the time she is finished he has assumed the position on their bed. Lying back with his arms stretched out overhead, wrists crossed, legs kneeling, hard member trust upward and exposed.  
  
She fastens the heavy, padded leather cuffs to the bolts in the bedframe, binds him stretched out and spread eagled.  
  
She knows she should let him sleep, but he looks too beautiful like this with his eyes all wanton, so the tender goodnight kiss on the lips turns heated until she kisses him on his eyelids and works her way down his body.  
  
He tastes of musk and the spring herbs of the soap and faintly of gun powder and steel, when she swirls her tongue around his balls, closing her mouth and gently sucking. The angle is not really suited to it, but she isn’t deterred and spreads his lower cheeks to suckle on his hole, thrust her tongue in his heat until he is arching up to meet her.  
  
There is a vial of oil in the nightstand but she has no patience for it and her pussy is sopping wet anyway, so she bites her lower lip against the heady rush of pleasure and coats two fingers in her juices, before sliding them into him.  
  
Her fingers massaging his prostate, her mouth alternating between his cock and his balls she coaxes him through four aborted orgasms, before he finally breaks, pleading with her to stop.  
  
“Please, mercy Lady Vex’ahlia. Mercy.”  
  
“Use your words, darling. What do you need? Be specific.”  
  
“I need to come. Oh god, I need to come sooo bad, please …”  
  
“Specific, darling.”  
  
“I want to shoot my come down your throat. I want to see you swallow it. I want you to spread my legs and slide your ivory dildo into my tight ass until I come all over myself. I want to be your good boy.”  
  
“You are. You are my good boy. And if you sleep and eat and take your punishment for one more week, I’ll make you feel so good.”  
  
“Vex, pleeease …”  
  
She raises a brow and ungently pinches his nipples.  
  
“Enough. I do believe it’s your bedtime.”  
  
By now his sack is swollen and achy with unspilled semen.  
  
She slides his cock, coated in pre-cum and salvia, deep into her throat, her nose brushing against the hard planes of his belly one last time for the night and enjoys his whimpers, before sliding up his body and kissing the tears of desperation from his eyes.  
  
“See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? Six more sessions and you will have re-earned your privileges to come. Maybe if you are especially good, Pike will tie me to the bed and you can kneel over my head, sliding your member down my throat and watch how it bulges around your beautiful cock. Would you like that baby-boy?”  
  
She cleans his face and genitals with warm water and a soft sponge, before throwing a sheet over his still bound form. She has to suppress a snigger at the way his straining erection is tenting the silk. Finally she piles heavy pelts on top of him and slips on a soft, black blindfold.  
  
“Time for bed now, darling boy. Sleep well.”  
  
Percy has finally found his words again.  
  
“Wake me by the second hour after sunrise, please. I have a meeting with Archibald.”  
  
“That’s hardly four hours away, we agreed to six. Percy, I don’t think…”  
  
“The second hour, if you please Lady Vex’ahlia.”  
  
There are two ways that he says Lady Vex’ahlia, the first one belongs to her lover, friend and bed-slave, full of lust and trust and love, the second one to her liege lord and warmaster of a good-sized city state, who expects immediate obedience, even when tied to the frame of their bed.  
  
“Fine.”  
  
She is too keyed up and sexually frustrated to sleep, but there is on odd sort of unspoken balance to it. She will sexually torture him and get off on the power rush, but she will not come and she will not masturbate until he can come with her.  
  
She cleans the sticky mess between her legs, carefully avoiding her swollen clit, puts on a heavy morning gown against the chill and sends a servant for some of Percy’s paperwork.  
  
Sunrise finds her in the study, Percy peacefully asleep in the next room, poring over intelligence reports from all over Tal’dorei. Dranzel has been surprisingly useful in establishing a network of informers.  
  
The power structure of the continent had been in tatters, even before the dragons came, with the guild leaders and merchant houses all but overthrowing Urial, only to be rudely interrupted by the dragons.  
  
Now nine out of ten members of the merchant council are dead and the rest are missing their ships and riches. Emon is ruled by a nascent republic, heavily undercut by the Clasp. The Markgrafen, which were challenging central authority every turn even before the catastrophe, have given up any pretense of loyalty and are openly exerting their power. Two weeks ago the Markgraf of Stillben raided a village belonging to Kymal with 200 men. It’s only a matter of time until open warfare breaks out between the petty kingdoms. Famine stalks the land, mountain giants and orc bands are roaming the plains in ever larger numbers.  
  
Whitestone is a single town and thirteen villages, 25 000 souls under their protection in these dangerous times.  
  
She finds the letter among a stack of papers, estimating the next wheat harvest.  
  
_… My ministers speak with great delight about the productive whitestone, copper, iron and coal mines on your territory, cousin. Even more they exhort the ingenuity of your distilling process and the interesting things you are doing with Golems. In these uncertain times it pays to know you friends, mylord. Your town is prosperous and, if we can agree to the bridge project, will soon grow rich. Many an unfriendly eye will turn towards it. Therefore I offer a formal renewal of the old alliance between our houses, co-financing the bridge with 20 000 gold talents and the protection of Westmark in form of 500 heavy horse, should the need arise, to be sealed by marriage contract. I have several eligible daughters, should you find my offer agreeable you are free to visit and pick the one, which will serve you best…  
**Signed with the Seal of His Grace Bertram of House Wendel, third of his name, Lord of the West, Middle and Eastmark, High Protector of Eisenstadt**_

She sets the letter down and stars long into the blinding, white light of the winter morning.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My porn is developing hints of plot. I'm afraid it will start makig coffee next and then it's only a matter of days until it takes over the world. Send help.
> 
> Unbetaed as always. If somebody wants to volunteer, let me know.

The meeting has been dragging on for hours and Vex is trying to pay attention, she really is, but the merits and demerits of a water powered pump engine for the deeper levels of the copper mine versus a refined white-stone powered one or even one of these newfangled hell machines, Percy and his little entourage of droll tinkers are so excited about, are lost on her.

Percy is going on about … something? Rubber seals and pump head, whatever in the nine hells that is. She studies him carefully, the impossible long silver lashes, that gleam in his eyes, he gets, when he is excited; the roguish three o’clock shadow, the ridiculous dork is cultivating because he thinks it makes him look older, more dignified; the infuriating little smirk on that pretty, pretty mouth of his.

Percy and Cassandra both carry themselves with an air of … what exactly? Vex has a hard time defining it, it’s not precisely arrogance. Neither is it charm, although Sarenrae’s angles be her witness, the boy can be charming when he puts his mind to it.

Maybe aura of command would be the best word, it’s like they don’t even consider, …, no, it’s like the world around them will not even consider the possibility of disobedience. The natural and completely unpretentious assumption that people will do as they ask seems to warp the materium around them.

“Vex.”

For all that she is on old hand at haggling, flirting and winking, she never had that particular skill. Probably something to do with being an uncouth half-breed.

“ **Vex.** ”

Not good enough for the Hall of Whispers. Not good enough for her father. And certainly not good enough for the heir to Whitestone, not when compared to some dainty princess with a pedigree longer than her leg and, more importantly, a trade deal and a military alliance with Husland in her virginal snatch. She can hear her father’s contemptuous chuckle in the back of her head.

“ **VEX!** ”

She blinks and finds Percival, Cassandra, Archibald and half a dozen members of the inner council staring at her.

“I’m sorry, Percival. I was pre-occupied. Could you say that again, please?”

Percy raises one eyebrow but does not commend otherwise.

Archibald clears his throat ponderously. “We were wondering Lady Vex’ahlia, if you could use your connections with Syngorn to secure an advantageous trade deal for us. The Lady Keyleth’s assistance with the winter wheat is the only reason we aren’t already starving, even so the Briarwoods left us preciously little to work with. Our stores will soon be exhausted. We need to trade metal, whitestone and hard wood for food or we will be down to the seed corn before the full moon.”

Vex smiles bitterly. “I can expect nothing from my father and Syngorn had to beat a hasty retreat to the Feywild, when the dragons came, so they will have lost most of the spring harvest. Even if they still have something left-over to trade, they will be much more interested in selling to the quarter million hungry, desperate humans on their doorstep. They know they are within a week’s march of Eman’s walls and, from what I understand, the threshold crests won’t take kindly to being activated again, without several months rest, at least.”

Archibald sighs heavily. “Well that settles it. We need Eisenstadt.”

Percy lips thin into a hard line. “We can trade with Vasselheim or Ank’harel, with Drynna or Trust Fields or any of the one hundred villages and towns scattered across the great plains.”

Archibald snorts contemptuously. “Don’t be stupid, boy. Half the villages on the plains are starving, likely because the other half robbed them. There is no food to be had between the Ozmit and the Lucidian, unless you want to fight for it.”

“The airship …”

“ … doesn’t have the carrying capacity and will need very expensive spell work maintenance, very quickly, if you insist on sending it on food runs over the Ozmit. You know that, you have run the numbers yourself. With your plunder from the dragon hoards, our mines and the expertise of you and that ridiculous fop Taryon, we have the once in a life-time chance to change the fortunes of our city for the better. Maybe the fortunes of mankind as a whole!

Only there will be no mass production of golems, if we have to waste the necessary investment on not starving during the winter.”

“You cannot honestly believe that Wendel will help us out of the goodness of his heart? He is angling to expand his reach. Get a foothold on Tal’dorei.”

“Very likely, yes. So? Like it or not, the Tal’dorei kingdom is finished. Until your army of gun wielding robots materializes, we are too small to be secure, in the wars to come. Having a powerful patron is good sense under such circumstances and, as kings and emperors go, we could do worse than Bertram Wendel. He is reasonable, mostly. At the very least it can’t hurt to hear his envoy and see, if we can hammer out a deal.”

“I find myself agreeing with the Steward, Percival.” Cassandra is coolly polite, treading a fine line between commanding and suggesting, in the way only a head of house, that knows that all her immediate subordinates would rather take commands from her brother than from her, is. “There is no cause, not to look into it.”

Percy’s face is unreadable and for a few heartbeats Vex hopes. He will come up with one of his brilliant, harebrained schemes to feed his people and let this cup pass them by.  “Fine. We will send an envoy and five guardsmen. They can take a letter to the Sund and find a fishing ship to cross.”

He stands up abruptly, “If you will excuse me. Archibald, you can handle the rest, if you have need of me, I’ll be in my workshop.”

If she wasn’t already concerned about the letter, Percy skipping out on council meetings would be a clear sign of something amiss. The rest of the council is still trading meaningful glances, while she quietly slips out of the door and follows him.

The three inch heels on her new leather boots make walking quickly more difficult than she is used to, so it takes longer than expected to catch up with him. _Last time I’m taking your fashion advice, Pike._

She finds him bend over the steam-belching contraption, set on heavy stone blocks against the far-wall of his cavernous work-shop. Most of the gas-lamps have been doused, but the coals in the forge give off a gentle glow and the amber light of the late afternoon is slanting through high, dusty windows.

Rows and rows of neatly ordered tools and part boxes, line the high shelves, casting forms, ovens and work benches are arrayed neatly around the central forge.  Half a dozen metal golems in various levels of disassembly are spread over the work benches, surrounded by magnifying glasses, spell books and an enormous arcane difference engine.

It’s hot and humid in the workshop, from various engines and forges leaking steam and heat, which serves her purpose just fine. She drops her belt and whips her tunic over her head, discards the cloth carelessly and saunters into the room, giving her hips an extra bit of swing.

Percy looks up from the number wheels and sector gears of the difference engine with an annoyed frown, which quickly dissipates upon recognizing her, she notices with a victorious smirk.

Her new leather boots might be worse than useless for any kind of stealth work, but she is tall enough now to meet him eye to eye and they do an admirable job of emphasizing her heart-shaped ass, especially when combined with leather pants, tight enough to be painted on.

“Hello, Percival.”

“Vex.” The corners of his mouth give a barely perceptible twitch, “Is there a sudden shortage of textile products, I wasn’t informed about?” His eyes flicker over the skin-tight black leather pants and shoulder-free corset, baring acres of smooth bronze skin and soft cleavage to his view before settling on her face.

Cocking her hip to the side, she smiles predatorily. “Oh you know me. Always open-handedly giving away the shirt of my back to the poor and needy.”

Percy rolls his eyes. “Quite. Especially when we needed to haul away plunder and had to cut back on the less important luggage. You always had an admirable sense of priorities.

Just please try not to give any of our esteemed council members a heart attack. That would be terrible inconvenient.”

“That’s the reason the gods and the tailor’s guild gave us over tunics. Anyway I think I will be able to control my urge to flash a crowd of balding, portly gentlemen in their later years.”

Turning back to the difference engine, Percy begins sticking his head back into the mechanical entrails of the contraption.

“In some ways a pity. At least it would prevent them falling asleep at the council table and drooling on their files.”

Vex is displeased. This was not the reaction she was going for when she assembled her clothes this morning. Men ignore her at their peril, including Percival Stick-Up-His-Ass De-What-his-face the third.

She saunters up to Percival and leans against the work table next to him, spine arched, breasts thrust forward.

“If you want to spice up the council meetings, I can think of a way or two.”

There is a minuscule pause, before he continues with … whatever he is doing inside the thrice-damned metal heap.

“I have a feeling you are going to enlighten me, if I want you to or not.”

“I could hide beneath the table, open the laces to your pants with my teeth.” She leans in, blowing her hot breath over the shell of his ear, watches the gooseflesh on his arm and the bulge in his pants with a victorious smirk.

“I could suck you turgid cock until you are hard like an iron bar, lash my tongue under the head, caress the glans with my lips, swirl the tip of my tongue over your little slit. Would you like that baby-boy? Exploding in my mouth? Feeding me your come like a hungry baby bird?”

Sproiiiiing. Some tortured metal spring shoots from the machine and Percival reappears, sucking on a bloodied finger and bright red in the cheeks.

“Allright, lay it on me.”

“I’m sorry?”

“What do you want Vex? Lay it on me.”

She gives him an incredulous look.

“I don’t think I’m being subtle here, Percy. Should I draw you a diagram?"

“That’s not what I mean. If you are laying it on this thick, you are working an angle, which means some likely idiot is shortly going to ask himself where his wallet disappeared to. I’m the only other person in the room, which installs a certain level of I don’t want to say worry, but ... So. What do you want?”

So many things. All of which she can’t ask for. She can steal, lie and cheat, even kill, for her happiness, for her family, but she will not ask him to choose between her and Whitestone.

_Not that there is much doubt how that would turn out, even if she scraped together the courage. Deflect and hide then. Do what you do best._

 “Ohhh?” Vex smiles her raptor smile, the pink tip of her tongue flicking over sharp teeth. She drags her finger from the triangular cut-out at the bottom of corset, baring her navel, lower over the golden skin of her stomach to where the smooth, hairless swell of her mons is showing over the rim of her low riding, leather pants.

“Maybe you should make sure, I’m not planning anything devious?” She steps into his personal space and palms his groin. “Tie me to the bed and spank me until I’m truly sorry for being such a cruel tease?”

Nuzzling the side of his face, she slides a long leg between his and whispers into his ear.

“You could punish me for being such a bad girl, making your poor balls all achy and full, keeping you from coming. You could wrench my arms behind my back, bind them there with smooth rope and force me to my knees. Please don’t darling; please don’t force me to suck you off, until you shoot your creamy spunk into my mouth. Please don’t make me hump my empty, aching pussy against your leg, while kneeling before you. Please, darling please.”

She is trailing soft butterfly kisses along his neck and underside of his jaw, watching him through long lashes.

He sighs quietly and leans against her, burying his nose in her long midnight tresses.

“I don’t think I have it in me, today. I’m sorry, dear. Could you …”

She smiles tremulously, “Say no more baby-boy. I have got you.”

She takes his hand and pulls him to the bed, set up in a corner of the room until Percy slips his hand from her grasp and the cold ball of fear, that has taken up residence in the pit of her stomach, begins crawling up her airways, fills her chest with ice.

“Excuse me, my dear.”

He pulls a silk handkerchief from one of his many pockets and blows into it, making a sound like a rusty war trumpet.

“Well, that’s attractive.”

His look of wounded dignity makes her break out in a fit of giggles, edged slightly with hysteria. She throws her arms around his neck and hides her face in the crock of his shoulder until the hiccups have subsided.

This is getting ridiculous. She can’t get a heart attack, every time he won’t hold her hand.

“I’m sorry dear; I seem to have acquired a stuffed nose and a bit of a cold. Maybe you should keep your distance for the time being.”

Rolling her eyes she pokes him in the chest. “First of all, fuck that. Secondly, this wouldn’t happen, if you slept once in a while or had a meal, you big baby. If you feel the need to martyr yourself, at least have the decency to inform me, so I can enjoy it properly.”

His crooked smile makes her flush from ears to toes, her hardening nipples brushing uncomfortably against her corset.

“I’ll see what I can do.” He says, the smirking idiot.

She knows this is stupid and short sighted. They should be having a conversation about the future of their people, about why he still hasn’t told her about the letter. Why he hasn’t come to her.

She is more than familiar with not wanting to face uncomfortable truths. She understands he needs time to work through this at his own pace, but it still hurts.

She has never been good with words. Oh, she can make charming conversation, flirt and wink with the best, but her tongue grows slow, awkward and stupid when there is something on the line that actually matters. Speaking with her body, though … that’s a dance she knows.

 She pushes him back on the bed and begins unlacing his boots, strips him quickly and efficiently.

“Lie back on the bed, baby-boy. Hands over your head.”

His eyes darken to cobalt, the darkest edge of a feywild sunset sky and Gods help her she is waxing poetic. She folds her hands in her lap to hide the shaking and tries to ignore her heart jackhammering against her breast bone. Long sprawling limbs, the faintest hint of pale freckles spread over his nose, protruding rips and skinny muscles, six, nearly seven, years her junior and beautiful enough to make her heart ache.

It’s not supposed to feel this way. She has fucked more than her fair share of men and women, liked some of them well enough. Once the original lust has worn off, ideally there is supposed to be comfort, maybe friendship even. The wildness and the needy want, he ignites in her, frighten her.

His cock is already hard and straining, smooth, pale pink against the golden loops of the snake curling around it. She can feel the slickness trickling out of her, the friction of her tender clit against the swollen folds of her sex and the soft leather of her pants.

She has always scoffed at men, who prefer virgins, considered the primitive urge to claim and possess, what no one else has taken, distasteful at best. Horny dogs pissing on walls, thinking they own people. Now she desperately hopes she was his first woman, the first to steal his kisses and his cum. He has never mentioned anyone, no pretty blacksmith to press her breasts against him in the heat of her forge, no beautiful tutor to lean over him and whisper verb declinations in his blushing ear. That has to mean something.

Some forest clans in the jungles south of Syngorn, consider the one you share your first time with more important to your life's weave than who you marry.

(She can hardly remember the name or face of her first bed-mate, but she remembers rather clearly the garlic on his breath and the 5 gold, 37 silver and two good horses, she and her brother stole of him, the very same night.)

No matter who comes after her, this part of him will always belong to her and she has never been good at sharing her possessions. _Always such a greedy girl._

She swallows thickly to get rid of the desert dryness in her mouth and says:

“Give me your hands, please, beautiful.” She was going more for confident and seductive than squeaky and pathetic, but she will have to make do.

She carefully winds loops of smooth coils of rope around his wrists, double checks for constricted blood flow and possible nerve damage, before tying it off to the posts of the bed.

She hungrily rakes her eyes over his pale, hairless, helpless body; takes him into her arms and kisses him like a conqueror, licks into his mouth, sucks on his tongue. His head falls back onto the pillow as he yields to her assault, moaning prettily.

Breathing heavily she leans her forehead against his.

“Pike will soon be back and we have to prepare you for her, here.” Her hand dips between his legs, her fingers gently, but insistently, massaging his anus.

“She is so full of love for you.”

His smile is bright enough to light the room, when he bumps his nose against hers.

“For us. So full of love for us.”

She lowers her eyes, uncomfortable. “Maybe. Although I think she will be plenty cross with how much I make you suffer for my pleasure.”

Percy opens his mouth to protest, but she shuts him up by thrusting her tongue into his mouth. “Don’t argue with your mistress, baby-boy. Now be quiet and let me fuck you.”

“Can you imagine her? The big, cornflower blue eyes; the cute, little pointy ears. Her luminescent blush, when you smile at her.”

Her mouth is trailing lower of his helpless body, teases his nipples to stiffness before wandering downwards. Avoiding his cock entirely she takes his smooth balls in her mouth, sucking gently, caressing them with her bee-stung lips. . 

“Her beautiful breasts, full and high, the hard muscle in her flat tummy, the silver-gold hair falling in waves to her tight, little ass. I’m going to shave her sex, slide the razor over the soapy caramel skin and pink lips until she is smooth and slick for you. She has always wanted so badly to be pretty in your eyes. Would you like to see that baby-boy? My full lips sucking on her pink, little clit, my tongue deep in her sweet cleft?

I’m going to tie you up with your ankles above your head, so she can take her pleasure. Like this.”

She folds him in half with remarkable ease, stowing his long legs beneath his bound arms, tying his ankles to the same posts that hold his wrists. Her father’s voice whispers to her. Maybe not a blacksmith or a tutor, but a pretty acrobat, member of some wandering troupe that took him in, before they meet?

She shakes her head; torturing herself like this will do no one any good. Trailing kisses over smooth, white skin she meanders downward from the taut skin of his balls to suck on his puckered anus, swirl her tongue around his opening with abandon.

He cranes his neck to look at her and her heart stutters in her chest. The kiss-swollen lips, parted by soft puffs of heavy breathing, the pink blush, the _look_ in his eyes. The soft worshipfulness.

Oh, she could come from being looked at like that alone, if she could grind her drooling pussy against the matrass once or twice.

This, this must be how Pike feels like all day, a being of ethereal light and love and fire. No hard edges and embarrassingly needy thoughts, no memories of blowing some fat butcher behind his shop for a hunk of spoiled meat, because the hunger is gnawing at her innards and Vax can never know but they cut the hands of thieves in this town and they need to eat. No sibilant voice of her father hissing her inadequacies in her ear while she sleeps.

She rips her eyes away, face burning, spreads his muscular ass-checks and thrusts her tongue deep into his heat, hisses against his feverish flesh, sucks on the soft folds of skin until he whimpers with want and bucks into her mouth.

“I have bought her a new ivory strap-on for her, you know. It will fit her tight, little pussy perfectly. She never complains but I know it hurts her she can’t take you inside her body.”

 _Lying whore_. Her father laughs at her and it’s true. She would never admit to it but she is secretly glad that Percy is equipped generously, for reasons other than the obvious. Not absurdly so, she certainly had larger before, but too large for a girl standing 1.01 meters tall, no matter how determined. He might go to Pike when he needs to ask for guidance in a matter of gods and morals, and don’t they all, but the feeling of his semen pulsing deep into her sex or bowels, belongs to her alone.

“We need to make you all loose and pliant for her here, so that she can slide riiiight in.” She spreads oil around his opening, carefully slides a slippery finger into him, coating his insides in oil.

“Do you want to be fucked, Percival? Spread open and taken, while lying bound in the arms of the girls, who love you so? Not being able to resist while we take our pleasure from your squirming, helpless body. Our precious baby-boy, our pliant little whore?”

She adds a second finger, scissors them inside the tight, slippery muscles of his opening. “Answer me!”

“Yes, yes anything. Please. Vex, pleeease. It hurts, please. ”

She hides a smile against his hip bone and kisses his swollen balls. It has been nearly two weeks since his last orgasm and he is already on edge and desperate.

“So, you want to come?”

“Gods, what do you think? Please Vex, I’ll be good, come on just once.”

“But wouldn’t it feel better to wait a little longer, darling? Enjoy that delicious, breathless anticipation, the tight, hot stretch of near release? Fight it a bit longer … for me, please. My beautiful warrior, my precious boy.”

Percy groans wordlessly. There are tears glittering in his long lashes and she laughs delightedly.

“My brave prince.”

“You know, she doesn’t like to make you suffer like I do, so she will take this off you …” she flicks a finger against the rune-encrusted, golden scales. “ … but she will always stop when you ask her to. I want you to deny yourself for her. You will wait just before you can’t fight it anymore, her ivory dick grinding against your prostate, her small strong hands caressing you cock, then you will ask her to stop and not start again, until you have regained control.

You know she wants this but will never ask for it. You know it will make her deliriously happy that you would deny yourself, suffer so much for her, for her pleasure, for all the dark urges our golden angel will never voice. She will want to make you come but you will resist, again and again.

I’m going to hold you in my arms, wipe the sweat of your brow, put balsam and gentle kisses on your lips when you bite them bloody, whisper encouragement into your ear, hold your hand and your eyes through all of it. When you have made me proud, when you have fought and fought and can fight no more, I want you to say, ‘Pike, stop please.’, and when she has withdrawn from your ass, I’ll kiss you on the mouth with all the love and pride I have for you and you will come. You will come all over yourself from nothing but my lips touching yours, like so.”

She slides her bare arms further around him and kisses him first with the fragile reverence reserved for something beautiful and precious, then with the desperation of all the things she doesn’t know how to say, but needs him to understand anyway.

With a cry like a hurt child, he arches upwards in his bonds, his cock thrusting upwards into thin air, as the enchantment blocks his completion and Vex kisses him with all the vicious hunger of a wild woman in love.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here is a fine idea. Start writing aimless porn, put in a few throw-away lines, because hey it sounds cool. Discover there is actually something resembling a plot beneath all the random, kinky sex. Meditate on the likely fact, that no one reading porn is here for the plot and everyone interested in the plot will probably be frightened away by several thousand words of porn. Solid writing choices. 
> 
> Anyway ... still unbetaed but no porn in this chapter.

The gusting north wind carries the battle songs of the war band to them, as Pike tightens the straps of her cuirass. Grog leans on his great-axe, scratching his beard and smiling into the ice crystals the wind whips into their faces.

“Your remember old man Henderson? Two doors down on Coal Street? He had a dog, ugly mutt. Wagon drove over its tail once, made similar noises.”

“It’s Orcish. Hyarunki, if I’m not mistaken.”

“You speak that?”

“A few words. Enough to get the gist.” _We are the stormwind, the blade wind, Oazu’s howling rage manifest. Ours is the fury._

“And?”

“They want to kill us all.”

“Oh.” Grog mulls that over for a moment, before nodding. “Good.”

The caravan master is jogging back along the wagon line to where the rear guard is assembling.

“What are you standing around for, like a bunch of sister-fucking morons? Get going. Hannes don’t spare the whip with the oxen.”

Pike raises a pale brow under her helmet. “What for? There is no way we outrun a war band on oxcarts, especially on a road drowning in snow and with nowhere to go. Our best bet is trying to defend the river crossing. Kill enough of them, maybe they will reconsider, go looking for easier prey.”

Master Hildebrand spits in the snow. “Ordinarily I would agree, but the de Rolos used to have a garrison in the pass. Outriders say it’s manned again. If we can stay ahead of them until they come to our assistance we might have half a prayer of something better than a heroic last stand.”

Pike frowns, quickly calculating distances and odds. Numbers know no mercy, Percy has taught her that. “Won’t work. They will be upon us, before we reach the foothills.”

“Not, if we can collapse the bridge. Orcs are a hardy lot but they drown and freeze just like the rest of us and the Whiteknife is fast and deep and cold.”

“Grog?”

“On it. You wimps, stand back and let me show you how it’s done.”

Grog steps forward, ice and snow crunching under his boots, into the rushing water of the river, just far enough to loop a heavy rope around the first pair of pillars, but already submerged to his hips into the icy flood.

The teamster cracks his whips and the team of oxen lumbers forward, while Pike and the rest of the rearguard dig their heels into the slippery slush of mud and snow and pull, as Grog smashes his gauntlets into the pillars, crumbling granite blocks like delicate spring flowers.

The bridge shutters, crumples and with a deep bass groan collapses in on itself in a cloud of stone dust and fountains of frothy ice water.

“That was fun.”

Whips crack as the oxen pull forward and the wagons plow through the snow. Fear is breathing down their necks, the bellows of the quickly closing war band causing the tension in the shoulders of the men and the nervous glances over their shoulders.

The road is difficult, slippery ice under a layer of fresh snow, the animals fearful, and the men afraid. The land is rising slowly beneath their feet but progress is torturously slow.

“Hannes. Hey, Hannes.”

Pike grasps the halter next to the wagoner and pulls the reluctant animal forward, paying no mind to the nervously rolling eyes and anxious mooing.

“Why don’t we just abandon the wagons? Twice the speed and more likely than not, our overeager friends back there will prefer easy loot to a bloody fight.”

Hannes, pale under his tan, spits into the snow.

“Try suggesting that to the caravan master. Any man, who abandons his charge, will never work for him again, his wages garnered to make up for the loss. I would be lucky not to end up in debtor’s prison.”

“If the Orcs catch us, you are all likely to die. You know that, right?”

The leathery, middle-aged man smirks bitterly. “If I’m jobless, I’ll die of hunger or cold before the thaw comes. There is famine, in case you hadn’t fucking noticed.”

Pike’s pouty lips have thinned to a hard, bloodless line.

“Grog, buddy. I think we need to have some words with our esteemed caravan master.”

Grog shrugs. Words are not his forte.

“Sure thing, Pike.”

He picks her up and places her on his enormous shoulders, his long legs catching up quickly with the head of the caravan with his mile-devouring stride.

Just when they are about to catch up, there is a commotion as the lead wagon slides backwards on the steep and slippery incline, slips, tips against a rock hidden in the snow, topples and crashes backward into the following cart in a tangle of limbs, panicky draft animals and broken wood.

Master Hildebrand is bellowing and red in the face when they get there, his men dragging a wounded animal handler to safety and trying to right a card.

“Lady Pike and Master Grog, Pelors blessing upon you, we are in dire need of your assistance. Master Grog if you could lend a helping hand to these useless layabouts, we need this wagon back on the road.”

Pike regards him sternly.

“Indeed. These men need many things, but a helping hand is chief among them. Grog?”

“Could you please tip over the last wagon in the line and then work your way forward? Please remember to tell the men to dismount before you do, though.”

For a moment shock and disbelieve war on Hildebrand’s face, before rage wins out.

“Are you mad, this fucking caravan is all I have left in the world … stop. STOP. HALT! SEIZE THE BRUTE.”

Three men hesitantly rise to their feet but sit back down hurriedly, their legs losing all strength, when Grog’s gaze sweeps over them.

Hildebrand’s hand falls to the handle of the long sword on his hip, his face white with fear and rage, but Pike’s gauntlets close around his wrist, Ogre Heads roaring, hard enough to make bone grind.

“This will not end well for you, Master Hildebrand. Best to drop your steel.”

The sword falls from nerveless fingers, sinks soundlessly into soft snow. Pike uses the elbow as lever to force the caravan master to his knees, but takes some tension from the man’s arm, when he stops resisting, and pats him on the shoulder. There is no need to be cruel.

“It’s just money. Not worth your live – or that of your men.”

Hildebrand laughs shrilly. “Are you mocking me, you useless midget cunt? That shipment is my last chance at buying my people and me a place of protection in the only city within 300 miles, which still has laws and food reserves, instead of knives and desperation.”

Pike gives him her best stern look, the one usually reserved for Grog when he is fiddling with things in Percy’s workshop he really shouldn’t touch. She is willing to overlook the midget thing for now, but if the esteemed Master Hildebrand does not cut it out soon, she will have to rethink her policy on hitting crying men.

“Let’s calm down and take a deep breath, yes? I know this is distressing but I happen to know the Lord of Whitestone personally and I can guarantee you, he will not turn his back on people in need.”

His eyes are bright with malice and unshed tears. “Just because you spread your legs for him, doesn’t change a copper penny in the reality of the situation. My men and I have no family there, no one to stand for us, no one to speak for us. The only thing separating us from refugees and other useless mouths, are the resources we bring. When hunger bites the friendless are the first thrown to the wolves, your cunt of a lord knows that better than most.”

“Hold your tongue, you up jumped horse thief.” Pike’s patience is running precariously thin and she will not stand for anyone bad mouthing her family.

“Maybe, we still have a chance. Sending some women and children out in the cold is still better math than forcing out a coherent force of men of the best fighting age. De Rolo seems like a cold fish, I don’t think he will flinch at the dirty parts, certainly didn’t flinch at yours …”

_Crack._

Hildebrand howls and falls backwards into the snow, holding the bloody ruin of his nose with both hands.

“Apologies, Master Hildebrand, I’ll be along shortly to heal that for you, but for the moment it’s probably better for your long-term health, if you are too busy whimpering to talk, especially when Grog is within earshot.”

She pats him on his back and turns towards the end of the caravan, where the crashing of splintering wood and the anxious bleating of draft animals, shows Grog hard at work.

A warning whistle from the outriders makes her head whip around and call for Grog.

There is movement on the slopes above them. For a few heartbeats Pike feels panic creeping up her spine, before recognizing the flowing white winter cloaks of the Pale Guard. A score of guardsmen on skiers is coming down from the pass.

Grog is jogging towards her along the wagon line, hefting his great-axe.

“Playtime?”

“Not yet, buddy. Playtime later.”

Grog eyes the caravan master, still quietly whimpering and nursing his nose, curiously.

“What happened to Mr. Face over there?”

“Stumbled over his wagging tongue and fell on my fist.”

Grog seems slightly miffed. “That ain’t fair. Anytime I want to whoop some ass, it’s always … ‘but diplomacy, Grog’, ‘but we should talk it out first, Grog’, ‘violence is never an answer, Grog’. I want a turn, too.”

Pike sighs quietly: “I’m sorry, big guy. It won’t happen again. Let’s say two, no three, of the biggest orcs are all yours? Ok?”

Grog interrupts his pouting to eye her curiously. “Is three more than two?”

Pike nods gravelly, “So it is. So it is.”

“I want more than three. Vex has been teaching me about negotiating with your shinies and she said never to accept the first offer.”

The gnome groans and resolves to have some words with Vex’ahlia, regarding the notions she puts into Grog’s head. For all that he is not terrible bright, once his mind has latched on to an idea, he is like a dachshund, not very likely to let go, unless his jaws are broken open with a hammer.

“How many do you want, big guy?”

“I want a hundred.”

Pike refrains from pointing out that the war band, thankfully, does not contain a hundred warriors.

“You got it.”

Meanwhile the Orc band has crossed the river and is closing in rapidly, as the Pale Guard men slow their rapid descend down the slope and come to a stop in sprays of powder snow.

She knows their Sergeant, a grizzled old veteran, by sight from Whitestone and does her best to assist him in assembling an improvised war council. Hannes speaks for the wagoners, a whip-cord like woman with more grey than red in her hair, known as Agnes, for the caravan guards.

“We were planning on leaving the wagons behind to keep them busy and just run. At the very least our position in your fort should be more defensible then the open road.”

Sergeant Theobald, or Shortnose, as he is known to his men, thanks to an old sword wound to the face, shakes his head.

“Out of question, I’m afraid. We were ordered to bring the oxen in and any other food stuff the wagons might contain as a top priority. The cooper sheeting and anything else useful, too, if we can.

Anyway. The old fort is a ruin, the new one consists of five log cabins with no defensive works to speak of. We have better chances here. Block of the road with your damaged cards and pick them of, while they are digging their way uphill through the snow drifts.”

Agnes spits on the ground. “I didn’t sign up for this shit, neither did my boys. I’m not fighting a double score of orcs for some oxen, not if we have alternatives. Don’t get me wrong, I’m wishing you and your guards the very best of luck, but me and my men will be hightailing out of here as fast as we can.”

Pike opens her mouth to protest, but Theobald is faster.

“You will do no such thing sell-sword.”

Agnes is smiling thinly; hand on the grip of her rapier. “Will I not?”

“You won’t.” Theobald meets her gaze, coolly unimpressed.

“And why is that?”

“Because if you do, my men will simply retreat. We have skis, we can easily stay ahead of the Orcs, you, afoot in the deep snow, you will be dead meat within the hour. Even if some of you escape, as deserters and cowards the gates of Whitestone will be closed to you and the next civilized town is nine days march through snow and storms and wolves and roving war bands. What do you think your chances are of surviving that? Now compare and contrast with your odds, if you choose to close ranks with us and fight the Orcs united, on favorable terrain and with a city to retreat to.”

Agnes is no one’s fool, she understands very well which way the odds swing and she doesn’t like the answer one bit, if the cornered look in her eyes is any indication.

_His arms wrap around her slim waste from behind, the sweat of their previous exertions still cooling on their bodies. His breath caresses the sensitive shell of her pointy ear, sending shivers down her back when he sleepily mumbles. “Numbers do not lie.”_

“Alternative proposal: How about we kill you and your white clothed nanny boys and take your fucking skis?”

Theobald’s smile is entirely without humor. “You are welcome to try.”

Pike can feel a headache coming on. “Oh, Sarenrae’s Angels, what a genius idea. Let’s fight this battle with our potential allies to avoid this other battle with the bloodthirsty idiots, which will kill us for sure, while we busy slitting each other's throat. Agnes, you are not stupid, so please stop pretending.”

“Milady Pike.” Hannes has taken of the crumpled leather heat, baring a thinning hairline, and is worrying the hat nervously with his hand. “Milady Pike, my boys are not really cut out for this kind of thing. Many of them have families to feed and don’t get me wrong, no one better to have your back in a fistfight or tavern brawl … but battling bloodthirsty monsters … It’s not what we do.”

He lifts his head to meet her gaze, his eyes pleading. “You said you would speak for us, milady Pike. It’s hard times and … if a family loses a provider it will spell doom for them all. This kind of fight … my boys will drop like flies. Could we not … I don’t know, provide support from a distance?”

Theobald is sympathetic but unyielding. “Numbers do not lie, Lady Pike. We are dangerously outnumbered as it is; we can’t spare a single man, much less a score of them. They will have to go into the shield wall.”

Pike stomach has contracted to an icy brick of fear, under the burning pressure of their expectant stares. Agnes, Hannes, even Theobald all subconsciously looking to her for advice, support, orders, absolution. The legends and the authority that the name Vox Machina carries has never felt heavier.

The war cries of the quickly closing band, drifting on the wind, fade and for a crystalline moment of stillness even the sound of Grogs grindstone on his axe blade seems to fall expectantly silent.

Pike breaths in, breathes out.

Makes her choice.

 

 

***

 

 

She wakes in the Court of Watchful Eyes and Whispers in the middle of the fourth night watch, in the stillness before dawn, a soundless summon ringing in her hears.

She opens her eyes slowly before she moves another muscle, giving her eyes time to adjust to the faint glimmer of lamp light, falling through the narrow window slit, high in the bare stone wall of her sleeping cell, listens to the noises of the sprawling building complex around her. The groaning of settling cedar wood and granite shedding the last vestiges of warmth into the winter night, the gargling of copper pipes, the melancholic howl of a signal horn on the walls, the far off ding of heavy iron on anvil, the golems swinging their rune hammers in the red forges.

She dresses and arms in stygian darkness, her movements precise and sure.

On silent feet she pads through the endless corridors, lit by flickering gas lamps. The Hunter’s Court never really sleeps, but with the exception of a few watchful eyes behind wrought iron masks few notice her passing, her black tunic and hood fading into the shadows.

This early the baths in the Court of Steel and Blades are still empty, the guard regiments asleep in their barracks or manning their duty posts. There is little time for her morning ablutions but she undresses, folding her clothes carefully, conducting the ritual cleaning. At the end she stands naked in the cold waters of the central basin and whispers three names to the four corners of the world.

 

Once for live.

Once for love.

And once for luck.

 

Once for the past, to find peace with her choices.

Once for the present to guide her hand.

Once for the future she hopes for.

 

The watch fires are burning high in the Court of Blood and Iron, but the first pale light of dawn is painting the eastern horizon mauve. Her watchful eyes register not only the squadron of Warhounds in ceremonial regalia, iron teeth gleaming, but also the full Sept of Imperial Shades lurking in the shadowy alcoves around the great iron doors, signaling the attendance of the Jäger.

_Seven swords and one pact, written in blood, for seven sons to hunt the night._

News must have come from the west. The air tastes of ash and electricity, vibrating like a barely constrained hunting dog on the leash. The elders are still in closed council. The stars are fading but the hunter’s lantern is standing high above the granite cupola of the diet, red as blood.

A cold hand ever so gently plucks on the nerves of her spine, gooseflesh spreading down her back; her mistress will tolerate no further dawdling.

She hurries down through the maze-like corridors of the central archives until reaching a door in a dusty side corridor, piled high with files and bundles of parchment sheets, bound loosely with strings.

An unassuming iron dear swings open, showing a narrow flight of steps disappearing into looming shadows. Only half of the lamps are lit down here and watchful darkness is pressing in around her.

This is the Court of Shades and Midnight where the night has eyes and teeth. Uninvited guests trespass at their peril.

The stairway winds ever deeper into the darkness, passing dozens and dozens of locked doors. Her first time down here she had tried to count heartbeats and passing passages, now she knows better and yields willingly to the sense of timelessness, swallowing her with nary a ripple.

The Court of Midnight has no patience for such fleeting human concerns; seconds, minutes or hours stretch and pull like rubber bands in these halls.

Finally a door swings open before her soundlessly, admitting her into a courtyard under a sable black night sky with strange and unsettling constellations. She wastes no time wondering about the sunrise that surely is painting the copper and bronze domes of the city above her a rusty gold or the dozens of meters of earth and bedrock this chamber should be buried under.

Her mistress awaits her, sitting cross-legged, surrounded in a half circle by seven heavy ivory bowls, on a polished rock cylinder, jutting upward from a night-black pond in the center of the courtyard. 

The air is still and cold, but the water in the bowls is rippling in strangely hypnotic patterns. Rolling polished dice, her Mistress bends over the oracle bones, mouth moving soundlessly.

“The huntress, the maiden, the laughing fool. Crossroads, crossroads … come closer child.”

A slime white arm beckons her forward.

“A decision has been made. They will be raising the regiments and as soon as the roads are passable again after the spring thaw, they will cross the Sund.”

“But … the council is still in session? Has Jäger Wendel …”

Her mistress raises her head from the dice, her eyes twin pools of black ice water, half her face is hidden by a black obsidian mask, the other smooth and white as marble.

“They will march.”

She bows her head silently in acknowledgment.

The pale fog rising from the bowls solidifies in an ethereal image of a young man; delicately chiselled features, thick, white hair, high cheekbones.

“We would prefer to have the cooperation of the city of Whitestone for this undertaking. This boy … you have met him?”

She feels something cold whisper over the back of her neck, a sudden burst of memories, … Percival’s glasses in pale moonlight … the flash of his gun … black blood and blacker powder stains ... his teeth gleaming red in the firelight. _Softly, softly now._

“I have met him briefly. I’m not sure what insight I might provide.”

For long moments the black in the eyes of her mistress seems to leak into the world, seep through her skin and bones and fill the inside of her head with ice needles. Then her scrutiny relaxes and there is a sound like rustling leaves.

It takes her a moment to recognize that the old woman is laughing.

“Clever girl and clever boy. Both so hungry, so full of trade and compromise. So full of _contract_. You will do nicely. Yes you will.”

Her Mistress’s gaze drops back to the oracle bones in her lap, toying with them, lost in thought. Just as she begins to wonder if the old hag's attention has wandered, the ancient, albino tiefling speaks again.

“You will be part of the delegation to visit Whitestone. You will take a letter of mine to him. Albrecht will lead the escort; Asulema will want the honor of leading the negotiations. Betram might just be stupid enough to give it to her, if only to shut her up.”

The corners of her mouth twitch in amusement.

“The Lord of Masks and Rolling Dice will be pleased.”

“You will be my eye and ear in this undertaking. Be ready tomorrow at first light. Go now child, you have much to prepare.”

Lilith bows deeply and walks backwards out of the courtyard, the skull like grin of the hunter’s moon in the sky above following her movements.

This is the Court of Shades and Midnight.

Knowing when to ask pointed questions and when to obey immediately is a fine and deadly art.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Graphic violence of the kind implied by medieval tribal warfare. Nobody here is paying attention to the Geneva Conventions, even less so than in RL. 
> 
> Unbetaed.
> 
> No porn.

If the orcs pursuing them seemed to previously fly over snow drifts with the fleetness of hunting dogs, now that nothing is to be done but wait for the inevitable, the whole horde is apparently wadding through molasses.

Pike is walking down their thin line next to Theobald, watching him speak quite words of encouragement to the men. The pale guards are warming their wax covered bowstrings, arrows planted at their feet, with grim detachment, the caravan men waiting next to them are pale and silent, fingers white around spear shafts and ax handles. Conversation is sparse and muted; nobody has the stomach for unnecessary chatter. A few of men they are passing mumble quiet prayers to the Mistress of Fate She-who-weaves-the-thread and the Lord of Masks, Him-of-the-falling-dice. The beginning and the ending, the two sides of the ever spinning coin. Creation and destruction. Rebirth and death.

Pike speaks a quite prayer to the Dawnflower, asking for protection and comfort.

_Your cool hand on their sweaty brow on the eve of battle, your strength to fortify their hearts in the fray, your smile and warm embrace to comfort them on their final journey._

Grog jumps on top of the barricade of overturned carts and barrels full of copper sheeting and bellows a challenge in the lengthening evening shadows. Pike steps up next to him, shield and mace at the ready. This is where their hammer will fall, where battle will be joined most fiercely.

The gray overcast sky, whose clouds have brought sleet and snowstorms for the last three days, have ripped open and the pink, indigo and orange of the setting sun, paints the snow-covered peaks of the alabaster sierras with the bright red of arterial blood. The orc horde throws long shadows over pale blue snow, just within bowshot reach.

“Safe your shafts; the wind is too gusting. Ain’t gonna hit jack and shit, boys. Wait until you can see the white in their eyes.”

The percussive crack of a gun shoot makes Pike wheel on her heel, heart beating in her throat. Of course Percy is nowhere to be seen, but a young Guardsman has unpacked a long musket and is scanning the enemy line through his scope.

Theobald and Agnes have taken up position next to the boy, talking quietly.

“If there is bone caster or shaman among the vermin, he has to go first. Then the war chief and any berserkers.”

The musket barks again and one of the orcs fall heavily into the snow, his leg kicked out from under him. A roaring bellows is raised from the war band, echoing from the grey granite of the valley walls, dozens of spears and ax heads rhythmically hammering against shields and breastplates, a throbbing counter point to their chant:

_Sword time,_

_Ax time,_

_Shields splinter_

The musket cracks again and the ululating wailing about to reach a crescendo is cut short when the head of the one leading the chant, explodes in a cloud of blood and bone splinters.

Slowly first, then gathering speed as best as possible in an uphill climb through hip deep snow, the orcs lumber forward. The gun fire behind her picks up pace, as their sniper is reloading as fast as he can and guardsmen and mercenaries ready recurve bows and crossbows.

Pike tightens the straps holding her shield to her forearm hefts her mace and takes her place next to Grog.

“Listen, buddy. If this goes sideways you grab Papa Willhand and that Monk, Percy asked us to get, throw them over your shoulder and make for Whitestone. Get your fun in now cause there will be no heroic charges for you later. You hear me, big guy?”

“But Piiiiiike …”

“Don’t you start! Papa Willhand made the Steak-and-Ale pie just for you, because he knows you like it and he shared his good booze, too. The least you can do is help him over some snow drifts.” Pike wags her finger at the Goliath. “Don’t pout either. Here come your playmates and they are all yours.”

Two dozen orcs are charging up the winding card road, fetishes and scalps streaming from their spear shafts, while the rest of the war band is trying to scale the side of the steep incline, through bare willow scrub and deep snow.

The first three orcs stumble and fall, crossbow bolts blooming like bizarre red flowers from their bodies, but the rest jumps over their fallen comrades and keeps coming, snarling with blood lust.

A javelin whirrs over her head, another she bashes to the side with her shield, sends it spinning into the falling dusk.

Grog bellows a challenge next to her and Pike finds peace. In the cold, feverish clarity of the sword dance she fells closest to Sarenrae. She is well aware of the inherent irony of being nearest to a goddess of healing and redemption in an act of destruction and bloodshed.

Nonetheless this is the purest form of prayer she knows, no base impulses of malice and cruelty, no nagging self-doubt, no city to protect, no friends to disappoint with weakness and absence, no boy with blue eyes, who smiles enigmatically, but offers no answers, just the beautiful clarity of the task at hand and the bloody, terrible elegance of motion and force, that is war.

The first orc to clamper on their barricade is bodily dragged of by Grog with a triumphant roar and thrown face-down into the snow, then his ax comes down and takes the top of the head off in a shower of blood and brain. A second is pushed back off the barricade by three mercenaries with longspears, blood dripping from his stab wounds. A third thrown back. A fourth.

Then the rest washes over their barricade, a howling tide of muscle, dirty leather armor and sharp blades.

Pike steps into the ark of the sickle sword, aimed at the weak point in her armor between pauldrons and gorget, hammers the rim of her shield upwards against the down coming arm, feels the crack of breaking bone more than she hears it.

Her mace whips around and smashes against the knee joint of the Orc, who collapses sideways with a howl of pain, as his leg bends in a way it wasn’t meant to. She has half a heartbeat to register the fear in his eyes, as her momentum carries her through her form and her mace comes down, caving in his chest into a pulped mass of blood and bone splinters.

No time for triumph or tragedy, her heart beating in her ears like a war drum, she pivots on her back foot and ducks just in time to have the war hammer whistle over her head. She stumbles backward, takes the second blow with her shield, a needle of white hot pain lancing up her arm into her shoulder, as the shear momentum of the war hammer drives her to one knee.

Pike draws from deep in herself, from the quiet, light-flooded memory halls, opens the door to the song of the weave, the golden, clever bird drill that is her patron goddess, tugs on strings of might and maybe, in that fuzzy, unformed shadow realm where possibility condenses into reality, where the great rivers of the arcane and divine have their headwaters.

A summoning circle of golden runes flashes into existence and for less than a heartbeat the eyes of her opponent glow with divine fire from the inside, then the fire flickers and fades, taking the spark of life with it.

The warrior tumbles face first into the snow and lies still.

Pike stumbles to her feet, nursing her shield arm against her chest, takes a moment to assess the surrounding; to her left an orc is kneeling on top of a pretty, young stable hand, she knows by sight, twisting his blade in the boy’s gut. Judging from his quite whimpering and the amused chuckling of the orc, the poor kid is still alive.

With a silent snarl, she drops her shield and grips her mace for a powerful, two-handed overhead strike, ignoring the shooting pains in her left arm. The world seems to slow down, her boots crunching in the blood-stained snow, the cold air burning in her lungs as she rushes forward.

At the last moment the orc notices movement out of the corner of his eye, interrupts his sport and throws himself to the right, so the mace smashes his, no her, collarbone and shoulder joint instead of her head.

Pain explodes in Pike’s left arm, her mace drops from her nerveless fingers, as she fights down the nausea and blackness creeping into her field of vision. When she has regained her composure, the boy is motionlessly curled up in growing pool of red, his tormentor whimpering in the snow next to him.

With trembling fingers she reaches for her golden memory halls and the divine gate therein once more to summon forth, healing, mending, relief for her arm and the pale boy, lying so still in his bed of blood and snow.

Before the incantation can complete her helmet is yanked backwards, the chins strap digging in her flesh, a jagged dagger reaching for her throat. Her right gauntlet snaps up catching her opponent’s wrist, while she throws her body backwards against his legs, hammering her shoulder upwards into the exposed groin.

Limps intertwined, they both go tumbling into the snow, rolling down the road. Teeth are snapping shut centimeters from her nose, carrion breath and salvia spraying in her face, the tip of the dagger scratching over her gorget.

Pike is far stronger than any girl of her size has any right to be, but her left arm is throbbing and she has been running on fumes for weeks now, the bone-deep exhaustion and weariness of the first the dragon wars and now the famine, crisis chasing crisis, is beginning to tell. She is losing ground. The orc is leaning his full body weight on his dagger with a triumphant grin, intend on driving it into her face like an icepick.

With a groan she gathers what strength she has left, hammers her armored knee upwards into his stomach and tries to roll out from under her opponent but the orc is holding on like a vice, her forearm is trembling and the knife point is hovering centimeters from her eyes.

Suddenly her enemy gargles, vomiting forth a gout of blood, as a sword blade protrudes from his mouth like an obscene tongue.

Exhausted Pike wipes blood from her eyes, let’s her head fall back into the snow and just breathes for a few seconds. When she has heaved the corps of her fallen foe of herself and stumbled to her feet, her rescuer has already rejoined the fray.

The tide has turned.

Grog‘s roaring battle cry is echoing from the granite peaks, his great ax whirling as he drives three orcs before him.

Theobald and Agnes have teamed up, longsword on the right, rapier and dagger to the left, dispatching orcs with a grim economy of motion.

The arrow volleys at point blank range into slow moving targets have done terrible execution. More than a dozen orc bodies litter the incline below the battlefield, slowly staining the snow crimson red, not counting the fallen on the road leading to their barricade.

The rest of the war band has carved a bloody path through the defenders, but their superior numbers are beginning to tell, as groups of twos and threes fall upon the surviving orcs, blades flashing.

With a trembling hand she strips the gauntlet from her left hand, which is already beginning to swell up like a red-blue sausage. Broken.

Fighting down the pain, she draws deep from the well-spring, which flows form her heart and brain, golden rune circles flashing around her arm, as bone realigns and knits and swollen tissue and tortured nerves are given relief.

Grog and half a dozen Pale Guardsmen are mopping up the last resistance, as the last survivors of the war band are running for their lives. Sell-swords, guardsmen and wagoners alike are tending to their fallen, while others are dispatching wounded orcs. Picking up her mace, she staggers towards the long line of wounded being collected in a hastily assembled field hospital.

***

“Johann, more hot water. I suppose asking for clean linens would be overly optimistic?”

“The answer is the same as the last three times.” The hulking barber surgeon presses a tankard of hot broth in her hand.

“Here, drink this. Can’t have you collapsing on us now, we still have four more guys to go and Marten has started bleeding, again.”

Pike sighs quietly. “How inconsiderate of him.”

She wipes her bloody hands on a rag and rises slowly, her whole body aching. It’s cold and windy in their improvised lean-to, night has fallen and the oil lamps are throwing flickering, dancing shadows on the canvas. Outside a wolf is howling outside, a sound filled with pain, a sound fit to make the soul freeze.

She hobbles over and sacks to her knees, next to the makeshift bedstead of a balding mercenary, whose breath gargles in his lungs and reaches out for the well spring in her soul, which has shrunken to a meager trickle.

She has poured too much of herself into the broken vessels of their wounded and the strain is beginning to take its toll. A faintly glowing rune circle blinks into existence, hovering over the hairy chest of the motionless mercenary, as her senses reach out, feel the hastily beating heart, the black growths in his liver, the gnarled muscles, the wrongness of punctured arteries leaking blood into his left lung.

She wrenches the universe sideways, forces the flow of time in an infinitesimal different path, as arteries and capillaries reknit themselves and Marten coughs up red-tinged salvia.

Her field of vision contracts, blackness seeping in from the edges; and she wipes away a trickle of blood escaping from her nose. Only the meaty paw of hand on her shoulder prevents her from toppling face first into a bucket full of bloody bandages and vomit.

“Alright. Time for break. Go out and get some fresh air and something to eat. Look after your pop-pop maybe.” Johann shoves her towards the tent flap none-too-gently. The wolf outside has taken up his song of pain again, drawn out ululating wailing, animal noises, bordering on agony. Pike can hear low laughter in rough voices. “Maybe have a look what those fucking ingrates are up to now.”

“Make up your mind, please. Either I take a break or I babysit your idiot friends?” Pike gripes as she stumbles out of the tent.

The night is icy cold and crystal clear, stars spilling over the sable black of the night sky like an emperor’s treasure trove. Most of their people are huddled around the watch fires for warmth but a few are repacking the carts or tending the draft animals in the flickering torch light.

Pike looks around for Grog and finds his hulking, black silhouette among a group of men, standing in a circle around a dark bundle in the snow. One of them does something, the glint of a dagger, red in the torchlight and the bundle, no … the orc, rears up against the boots pressing him into the snow, howling like the souls of the damned.  

Pike takes a step forward, when a voice stops her.

“I wouldn’t do that.”

Theobald is sitting in the wind shade of the tent, a bottle of sharp-smelling whiskey at his feet, longsword, oil and whetstone in his lab.

“You wouldn’t stop an outrage?”

The old warrior is not impressed.

“These are the fruits of wrath. The wages of war. Not so popular among the bards and story tellers but no less real for it. They like the flying banners and polished armour but seem less inclined to sing about the burning cities and screaming children.” The whetstone rhythmically scraps over steel.

“I don’t stand for sadists among my people, but every man in that circle has lost someone today.” He nods to a line of still figures in the snow, blood-stained cloaks drawn over empty, starring eyes. “With the exception of your big friend maybe.”

“They have a right to their vengeance. Better they get it out of their system before we return to civilization. Or do you want them to take that home with them? The rage. The hate. To their families? To their children? You are warrior; you are telling me you have never dinned from this dish?”

Pike things of a Duergar with a slit throat thrashing under her boot, thinks of blood on Vax’s blades, Grog’s terrible red grin, the smell of searing flesh and black smoke, Percy whispering: “Take his tongue.”

She thinks of her terrible savage joy in the sword dance and the metallic taste of blood on her lips.

She thinks of all the hate and secrets she keeps hard and silent in her heart, a black thorn bush bearing ghastly fruit.

“The art, Master Theobald, is in not letting it rule you.”

She shoulders through the throng of men, comes face to face with the man, the boy, holding the knife. For but a moment she stares into the face of a ghost, before recognizing the older brother of the boy, who was slain in front of her eyes but hours earlier. Judging from the crushed shoulder joint, she also has met their victim before.

She keeps her eyes averted from the bloody crater between the legs of the orc and extends her hand: “Give me the knife, Wilfred. This will not bring your brother back.”

He turns his head, his eyes the color of flame at its hottest point. She has starred down dragons and not blinked but the empty, burning hate in this kid makes her soul freeze. _Carefully now, Pikeypants. Be very careful, now._ It probably should give her pause how much the voice in her head sounds like Scanlan, but strangely enough it’s only comforting.

“No. But you might have if you weren’t too busy with other things.”

Shame curdles thick and heavy in her belly. “I’m sorry I saw him too late, but we had so many wounded, I couldn’t waste so much of my energy on …”

“…him?” His eyes flash dangerously and Pike bites her lip hard. _Smooth talking golden girl._ She rarely has missed Scanlan and his silver tongue as badly as she does now.

“There are rituals we can try, when we are back in Whitestone I can …”

“Horseshit.” His eyes are bright with unshed tears. He is leaning in close, his nose only centimeters from hers, so she can smell the cheap rotgut on his breath. Grog is looming in the background like a thundercloud, but she gives him a barely perceptible shake of the head. _Not yet._

“Nobody is going to pay for a resurrection ritual for some stable boy. I certainly can’t. But this animal will.” He stabs his gore smeared dagger towards the whimpering creature in the snow before them and turns away from Pike towards his victim.

“I will cut her open from cunt to eyeballs and make a tea cozy from her entrails.”

She gently grasps his wrist. “I can’t let you do that.”

His head whips around like a startled cat, teeth bared. “How are you going to stop me holy woman? How?”

She can feel the mood shifting around her, the barely contained violence in the crowd around her and very consciously does not reach for the dagger on her hip. They are heartbeats away from spilling blood. Grog is only three steps away, so there is no real danger, but this could turn very ugly in a hurry, if she can’t find the right words.

 _Crunch_. The sickening sound of a head being crushed like an overripe melon bursts through the tense silence.

Grog gives her an apologetic shrug, lifts his boot from the smashed head of the corpse and wipes the sole in the snow.

“Show is over boys. It was fun while it lasted, but I was getting bored anyway.”

His left gauntlets close around the knife blade and squeezes, crushing the cheap steel faster than any hydraulic press, but his voice is surprisingly gentle, when his right falls on Wilfred’s shoulder.

“Ain’t nothing to be done about it now, boy. Let’s all have a drink of my ale and pour a cup to thin air for the fallen.”

The intimidating presence of the hulking goliath and the prospect of drink seems to have done what her words could not and the crowd starts to break up, following Grog, who is steering the blindly stumbling Wilfred to the ale casks.

Pike and the mutilated corps, lying still in the snow, stay behind. Torchlight is glinting of something in the dead woman’s right hand. When she bends down and pries open the clenched fist, she finds a crudely carved cave bear tooth, a lock of fine red hair tied around it.

“Looks like a charm of protection.” Theobald has come up behind her, quite as death.

“You were a lot of help back there.” Pike shoots him a cold look.

The veteran shrugs. “I warned you, not to interfere with their sport. Can I see that please?”

Pike passes the charm. “What are you looking for?”

Theobald shrugs. “Signs. Portents. Something. War bands don’t usually attack caravans of this size, with an armed escort and everything. There are easier targets out there.”

Pike considers this. “The band was pretty large for raiders, but they had a lot of second line fighters. Men past their prime, women not really used to combat.”

The old soldier grunts his assent.  “They sent everybody, who could hold a weapon and walk. If they are that desperate the winter must be really biting in the high valleys. Here.” He flips her the charm.

“And? You learn something?” Pike asks.

“Charm of protection from their goddess of motherhood and fertility, I think. She probably had a kid recently.”

Pike bites her lip. “We killed three quarters of their warriors. This clan won’t make it through the winter.”

Theobald grunts. “We should be so lucky. If the little vermin grows up, it will inevitably come knocking on doors behind which my grandchildren play.”

He meets her cold gaze unflinchingly.

“This is the world we live in Lady Pike. We are all monsters to someone.”

***

Outside the sunshine of a cold, clear winter day, reflecting of the snow is bright enough to make his eyes tear, but the darkness in the catacombs beneath Castle Whitestone is old and deep and cloying, like a mantle of moth eaten satin.

Percival follows the secret ways, deep into the hill, to where the rock weeps black mineral oils and the heartbeat of the mountain reverberates in his bones. Down here the darkness seems to suck up the meager light of his torch. He steps carefully; the passages are uneven, roughly hewn rock and full of dancing, twisting shadows in the unsteady torch light. If he breaks a leg down here nobody will find him, for he is the last to remember these passages. Cassandra had still been too young, when the Briarwoods came.

When he reaches his destination, a dusty stone chapel, set in an unremarkable side corridor, he takes his time lighting half a dozen torches, evicting the darkness from its home. The flickering light reveals runes of protection and warding etched upon older, darker designs of beasts slaying men.

He rolls his shirt sleeves up, grits his teeth against the pain and draws his dagger over his forearm, catches the blood in a bronze bowl. When he has enough for his purpose, he heals the slash with a hissed command that makes the light of the torches dim briefly.

He has little love for these powers, has never coveted them but now that they are thrust upon him by necessity he is pragmatic enough to make use of the tools he is given.

Dripping blood over the summoning grid and interfering with the spell work would be … less than ideal.

He takes his time with the runes, dips the brush carefully into the bowl, and paints the arcane symbols with the patient perfectionism of a calligrapher.

Finally when he is done he fills a goblet with wine and puts it next to the blood bowl in the summoning grid, claps his hands three times and calls out:

“Ipkesh. Patron. Come forth.”

A burst of blue flame consumes the blood, the torches flicker in a sudden burst of wind and in the blink of an eye a handsome, regal young man has appeared in the summoning grid, casually holding the goblet in his left.

“Why, if it’s not young Percival. I must confess myself to be disappointed; abominable taste in vintages and the décor …” Ipkesh leans forward and eyes the runes. “Where is the trust, Percival? Where is the trust?”

Percival ignores him. “I propose a contract.”

“Straight to business, then? Fine.” Ipkesh folds his longs limps into a tailor’s seat, lounging like a fat viper waiting to strike, bleeding shadow into the world.

“What do you propose to offer me then, boy? Can’t be your soul, I already own that.”

Percival nods easily, “So you do, but I’m a man with ambitions; I would prefer to enter damnation in a position of authority and in good standing with the powers that be. The higher the standing of my patron, the better my own position. So, I’m offering the soul of a sinner consigned to the abyss and the hated host of demons, if you assist me in recovering her and leave me in charge of her contract.”

Ipkesh laughs, genuinely amused but the slippery bastard cannot hide the greed flashing in his yellow snake eyes.

“Still in the materium and already building your own retinue? There is the spirit. Consider me intrigued. Who is it then, that you would go to such lengths to wrest her soul from the abyss? And a her, is it?”

Percy grits his teeth and woodenly nods his assent. “It is.”

“How terrible romantic.” Ipkesh sighs dreamily. “So? Who is the lucky girl?”

“Ripley.” Percival is smiling entirely without humor.

“Anna Ripley.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unbetaed as always. 
> 
> No porn.

The scouts of the grey hunt spot the caravan, winding its way down from the mountain roads, half a day’s march outside of the walls of Whitestone. A thin sleet is falling and both beasts and men are exhausted from digging their way through endless miles of fresh snow drifts, the carts either converted to makeshift sleds or long abandoned.

The alarm is raised when a wagoner spots movement on the opposing slope, six white shapes emerging from the fog and snow-covered forest, pale as ghosts.

The guards are stringing their bows, when a large grizzly bear joins the group and bellows a greeting, Grog takes a running leap and charges his favorite wrestling partner.

Pike jumps after him with a huge grin, only to sink into a bed of cold, wet, fluffy whiteness till her hairline, courtesy of the fresh powder snow drifts and her heavy armor.

“Need a hand, sweetness?”

Pike spits out snow and lifts her gaze to meet a pair of startling green cat eyes, flecked with gold and shimmering with amusement.

“Smugness, doesn’t suit you, Vex.”

“Oh?” The half-elf flicks back a strain of her midnight black hair. “I think it looks fabulous on me, although …”, that cursed feline smile again. “Some people report that it gets better the less I’m wearing.” She shimmies her shoulders, cocks her hips, moving her body with sensual cat-like grace beneath the heavy winter clothing and Pike is suddenly glad for the snow to hide her blush.

“You coming out of there, short stuff, or do I need to send for Grog and a shovel?”

Pike grunts, outraged, grabs Vex’s ankle and yanks, snowshoes and heavy boots and all. The half-elf lands hard on her posterior, with an undignified squeak. Pike roars a battle cry and is on her in a heartbeat, stuffing snow in the back of her shirt.

“The higher they are, the harder they fall.”

“Oh just you wait, squirt.” Vex doesn’t like being bested by anyone, much less her tiny gnome lover and daily practice with a heavy war bow has left her frighteningly strong. Still she is no match for the power of the ogre gauntlets and Pike ends up sitting on her chest pinning her hands overhead in the snow.

“Oh no, the merciless gnome war lord has bested me. Whatever shall you do with your prisoner?”

Vex’s grin is wide and obscene enough to put Trinket to shame; the only thing missing is the lolling tongue.

“Stop that.” Pike can feel the tips of her pointy ears heating up.

“Stop what?”

“Stop flirting with me. Everyone is watching.“

“Then we better give the poor boys a show that will keep them warm at night.” Vex rears up suddenly, catching her in an open-mouthed kiss, sucking on her full bottom lip.

Pike can hear Grog hollering in the background as she leans into the kiss and the world around her recedes into winter sunlight and snow crystals like spun silver lace. Someone is clearing his throat loudly behind them and Pike shoots of Vex like a crossbow bolt.

Theobald is very intently studying the horizon, face stony. “Any news from his Lordship?”

Vex rolls on her feet. “You are behind schedule Sergeant. Did you bring what Percival asked you to?”

The veteran shrugs. “As best we could. We lost seven men to an Orc band, but the snow was the real issue. A third of the draft animals died due to cold and exhaustion or had to be butchered with broken legs. Ice and step paths make for a difficult mixture. We could recover most of the dead oxen but we had to leave the copper sheeting in the pass. I brought as much of the foodstuffs as possible and the books.”

“What about Fassbender?”

Pike shakes her head. “He is still with Kerrek, they need him there. Westrun is a war zone of armed camps. Too little food and too much desperation. We need to get Keyleth and evacuate as many as we can to Whitestone.”

Vex bites her lip. “We will have to talk to Percy about this. Meanwhile, let’s see if we can’t do something about your snow problem.”

She pulls out a strip of parchment and a pen, scribbles a quick note, rolls it up and seals it into a small metal cylinder.  Vex reaches in her pack, pulling forth an intricate clockwork bird of brass, bronze and iron, slips the cylinder in a prepared slot and whispers the command word.

The jewel eyes of the automaton light up, unfurling his wings with a _Whooosh_ , hundreds upon hundreds of intricately worked bronze feathers reflecting the weak winter sun light, cocking his head expectantly at Vex.

“Whitestone. Go.”

The bird jumps into the air and within heartbeats has shrunk to a quickly receding black spot against the low hanging clouds.

Vex nods satisfied and brushes some snow from her leather pants. “They will be sending someone to clear the way for us within the next two or three hours. Have your men take a break, Sergeant.”

Theobald is eyeing her suspiciously. “If we want to make it to shelter before nightfall, we have to keep going.”

“Have no fear, Sergeant. We will get there with daylight to spare and no more dead animals. Some of Lord Percival’s newer work. Just wait and see.” Vex gives the old soldier her most winning smile and a wink, but the veteran shows no sign of being impressed by her charm.

“If you are certain.” Theobald gives her a look full of lingering mistrust and turns on his heel, bellowing orders. “Dismount and start cook fires, we need something hot in our bellies. Duane, Lemuel first watch is yours.”

“What was his problem.” Pike frowns, annoyed, at his retreating back.

Vex smile is just a tiny bit forced. “Turns out outsiders are not universally appreciated in Whitestone, right now. Even, or maybe especially, if they share the bed of the sitting lord.”

Pike opens her mouth for a heated response but Vex cuts her off.

“How is grandpa Wilhand?”

“Asleep in one of the sleds. How are things at home, Vex? Is your brother still in Zephra?”

Vex sighs and takes a seat next to Pike on one of the sleds as men scurry around them, tending the draft animals, lighting fires and preparing a hot meal with their meager rations.

“Could be worse, I guess, but certainly could be whole lot better, too. The council has imposed mandatory rationing three weeks ago, which will save a lot of lives especially among the poor and day laborers, but we have made enemies that way. Especially among the merchants and farmers. Percy had to send the guard in to confiscate hidden caches, people got hurt.”

“We have been sending out hunting expeditions but the game is growing scarce.” Vex nods toward the two winter-starved dear, slung over Trinket’s back.

“I’m afraid we have already damaged the breeding population for years to come. Percy and Tary have been fiddling with all kinds of golems and automatons, like the bird. They say come spring the profitability of the mines is going to explode.”

Vex makes a face. “Of course this will do exactly nothing for the people which are hungry right now. Gods, I miss Vax.”

Pike is rubbing her holy symbol worriedly. “Is there no way to trade for what we need? We have gold.”

Vex leans her head on Pike’s shoulder. “Not in the amounts we need and nobody is selling anyway. On the plains food is more precious than gold right now. There is a delegation coming from Husland, but …”

Her voice trails off.

“Everything all right, Vex?” Pike asks.

Vex shrugs her shoulders. “Of course darling. Whatever could be wrong.”

“I don’t know you just … You look …” Pike hesitates, struggling to put her feelings into words.

Vex smiles her cat smile, but there is definitely a nervous edge beneath it. “Sexy?”

 _No. Well, yes but mostly wan. Drawn. Unhappy._ Pike bites her lip. It’s not that Vex is looking unhealthy but there are dark circles around her eyes and her fingernails are chewed back to the bed.

“Is something worrying you?”

Vex opens her mouth, closes it and sighs unhappily. “Apart from the famine, the brewing discontent and Percy hardly eating? The noble idiot has set himself on half rations, because he isn’t performing physically taxing labor and most of that goes back to the servants untouched, who promptly gobble it up.“

Vex is rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge them anything. Several of the women in the kitchen have children and they need every bite. I would just be happier if they could get feed without my favorite idiot starving himself into an early grave.”

Pike pats her shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’m home now and I have no intention of letting this foolishness continue. We will hammer some sense in that boy, if he wants to or not.”

Vex smile turns mischievous and Pike rolls her eyes, smirking against her will.

“I have bought something from Gilmor that might just be right for the purpose…”

“When did you turn into Scanlan?” Vex smile disappears again and Pike bites her lip, cursing her foolish tongue.

“I guess I’m just trying my best to fill the gaps and with how people keep leaving I’m getting pretty good at it?”

“Vex …” Pike is helplessly casting around for something to say, but her mind is blanker than Wilhand’s freshly scrubbed Saranrae altar on the summer solstice.

 “Forget it dear, let’s just get back home, take a bath. Shave your legs and maybe have a girl-talk. If we are really lucky or tie him to the bed we might even get Percy to speak to us for more than a minute at a time.”

Pike sighs and huddles into the arms of her lover, combs her fingers through long dark hair, coming loose from its braid, and rests her head on Vex’s shoulder. 

When Vex shakes her awake the pale winter sun has already passed the zenith and men are crowding the western edge of the camp around a hulking metal automaton, larger and broader than Grog, with two smoke stacks, spitting smoke and cinders, protruding from its massive shoulders and barrel chest.

The iron golem is pulling two large sleds, while pushing a heavy snow plough before him, which has left a cleared road of ankle deep snow in his wake.  The second one seems to be empty, but the first one holds a mount of coal and several figures bundled up in fur.

“Is that …? Is that giant fur-ball Taryon?”

Vex grunts, “In the flesh. Him and his hell machine. It’s all Percy is talking about these days. If it’s not supply lines, infrastructure and logistics, it’s pressure drops, combustion chambers and valves.”

Pike raises a pale eyebrow, a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth. “Are you jealous of a giant metal contraption?”

Hissing like a startled cat, Vex rounds on her. “First of all, I’m not jealous. I don’t do jealous, I don’t get jealous and if the boy wants to spend all hours of the day fiddling with his … his damn steaming machine and heating his curling iron, it’s nothing to me. I just think he could use some fresh air, so you can just wipe that smirk of your face, Pike Trickfoot.”

Pike grins, “You are adorable when you are jealous.”

“If you don’t shut up right now, I’ll pour glue in your boots. Ask my brother if I make idle threads.” 

Pike’s grin turns all teeth. “You do know that I come by my name honestly, right? Bring it, if your delicate constitution can take the heat.”

“Oh, it’s sooo on you little scamp, I’ll light your ass up like a weed pipe…”

“Gentle Ladies. May I interrupt your lovely conversation?” Very few people own sable lined satin cloaks of this quality in Whitestone and only one would swirl it with quite such a dramatic flourish.

Vex rolls her eyes. “What do you want Tary?”

“To return to the a homely house with a warm fire in the heart and a cup of hot, mulled wine and a heated brick pre-warming my feather bed. Maybe a scented footbath and … “

“Let me rephrase.  Why are you here?”

“Oh, well. Percival send me, of course, to clear your way and assist the damsels in distress. The new golem is prototype after all and needs constant supervision and young Percival is busy trying to set up the new saw-mill. You see, the power transmission straps constantly jump their tracks and…”

Vex stalks up to Taryon and leans in until her nose is nearly brushing his. “Someone is going to be in very serious distress, very soon, unless they learn to get to the point.”

Smiling sickly Taryon takes a step back. “There is no need to assault me with your morning breath. Percival simply asked me to hasten your return to Whitestone. Apparently the Husland-delegation is preparing to cross the Sund ahead of schedule and he wants you back in the castle as soon as possible, both of you. We cleared the road and there should be guardsmen with fresh horses for you two and sleds for the wounded less than an hour behind us.”

Vex pales beneath her tan and turns on her heel. “Come on Pike, you can ride Trinket. Let’s get going, the sooner we meet the horses, the sooner we will be home.”

Pike hurries after her, cursing her short legs, but hesitates and turns around to Terry.

“Are you coming back with us?”

“The sergeant had to abandon most of his cargo in the pass, so we will probably carry on, collect the cooper sheeting and whatever dead oxens we can recover, load it all on the sled. Why?”

Pike takes a deep breath.

“There is cairn in the pass, close to the huts, where we buried our dead. If you have any carrying capacity left I would ask you to bring them home. Especially …”

“Especially … what?” Taryon looks at her questioningly.

“Nothing. Just bring them home. I gotta go.”

Pike turns and runs after Vex who is already waiting impatiently with her scouts.

***

The dense fog rising from the marsh-land around them has turned into a miserable drizzle, the wind from the sea is cutting through their cloaks with teeth of ice and moisture, every water droplet a tiny knife.

Lilith huddles deeper into her cloak and oil skins like a snail into her house and eyes the moss-covered, overgrown ruins, pocking from the pools of stagnant brackish water, the reed choked ponds surrounding the causeway.

“What a miserable shit-hole.”

“It was not always thus.” Sigmund the soft-footed secretary has drawn his mule abreast with her courser. A color-less and soft-spoken man, he has a tendency to fade into the background unless he is actively participating in the conversation, which is rare.

“Before the Sundering and the great floods and black things in the depths, before the trade over the Lucidian Ocean whitered away to nothing, this was a great city.

Great trading houses and market halls and soaring domes of granite and bronze,  thousands of ships, sails like wind-blown clouds, bringing the riches of the world to these lands, saffron and pepper and iron wood, cobalt and dyes and honey wine, opium and milk of the poppy, arcane constructs, iron and cooper and Whitestone.  Once it was known as Topaz City for the waters of its bay.“

She opens her mouth but finds that the sudden outburst of the otherwise so phlegmatic man has robbed her of anything to say.

“I apologize. The Bloodroyal will expect my presence in the Sea Keep. I should not tarry any longer.”

Sigmund urges his mule forward, horseshoes clattering on the cobblestones as he spurs his mount to catch up with the head of the column, where the Imperial Standard is barely perceptible through the drifting veils of rain.

Like hunger-starved skeletons a village of moss-covered stilt houses emerges from the drifting fog, huddling in the shade of an enormous stone fortress, crouching upon the cliffs like a foul-tempered watch dog.

The column winds its way up the steep granite cliffs overlooking the marshland and the bay. The Sea Keep is an enormous pile of sea-weathered granite, streaked white by bird excrement, interlaced bastions of dark stone, spilling around dismal court-yards and narrow, thickly packed houses with step slate roofs, ducking in the shade of twelve fat, looming drum towers.

When the empire still had feared the dark things hunting the Lucidian Ocean, this fortress had been built, expanded upon the earlier fortifications upon the cliff, together with others like it along the coast-line to protect the heartlands from the things, sleeping in the depths.

Generations passed, the memory of White-Towers-Upon-The-Sea disappearing in a single night of fire and death, fading into history and although sea travel on the Lucidian without having a view of the coast remained a death sentence, none of the horrors that crawled upon the beaches during the Sundering had ever shown themselves again. The garrison had gradually dwindled as ever new wars and catastrophes made fresh demands on the resources of the Empire and the gigantic fortress, once home to two thousand men and their horses and war hounds, no held less than a hundred soldiers, it’s endless winding corridors and great halls abandoned to creeping lichen, rats and birds.

So although the delegation, counting the personal bodyguard of the Bloodroyal, nearly doubled the number of inhabitants inside the crumbling walls, space was not hard to come by.

Exhausted, cold and saddle-sore Lilith lets Snowflake pick her own way, the mare following the baggage trail through the stone tunnels upwards into the main courtyard. Murder holes yawning above her head, Lilith eyes the stone reliefs of war hounds ripping apart a kraken doubtfully.

Then the chaotic, busy mill of the central of the central courtyard swallows her whole, a mad maelstrom of shouting soldiers, busy servants unloading wagons and stable boys taking care of the long suffering animals in the flickering torch light.

Lilith has just handed over Snowflake to a stable boy, when an Imperial Shade emerges from the shadows of the gateway.

“You are Lilith Daturei?”

Lilith does her best the meet the dark almond eyes behind the black iron mask and not eye the double ax-swords hanging of the hips of the soldier before her, which is no easy task. The shade is a lithe, long-legged woman of middling height but the soldiers and stable boys alike give her wide birth. The Talons of the Empire have a reputation.

“Yes?” Liliths swallows to wet her suddenly desert dry mouth and tries her best to keep her voice steady.

“Come. The Bloodroyal demands your presence in the Council Chambers.”

Lilith follows the shade through a bewildering mace of corridors and step stair cases, giving views of the waves crashing against the foot of the cliffs through narrow arrow slits.

A smoky peat fire is burning in the drafty hall, a dozen men gathered around a heavy oak table. Lilith recognizes some of them, Sigmund the Secretary, Dieterich the Master of Horses, Wolfgang the Commander of the War Hound detachment, travelling with the delegation, Sebolt the representative of the Court of Coin and Pergamum, Armin the personal bone caster of the Bloodroyal, some others, which she assumes to be the commander of the fortress and local dignitaries and, of course, the Bloodroyal himself, an intense young man, full of barely suppressed tension, like a coiled whip.

The son of the Jäger-in-waiting and currently third in line for the throne is a lean, pretty boy with startlingly bright turquoise eyes and an imperious aura bordering on petulant.

Lilith does her best to stay in the background, drawing the attention of the Bloodroyal and possibly provoking his famously foul temper, is the last thing she needs.

Her escort quietly slips in the space behind the left shoulder of the crown prince, black eyes restlessly scanning the chamber and its inhabitants.

A discussion is already in full swing.

“… and I’m saying again, I will not be able to guarantee the safety of his grace, when crossing the Sund, much less in Tal’dorei with only 30 hound riders. I would feel much safer if you would allow me to send for reinforcements from Hallstadt. A full century at least.”

“Her” Shade bends forward to whisper something in the Bloodroyal’s ear and the boy lifts a hand and shakes his head impatiently.

“Enough. We have been over this. While my personal care takers agree with you, Master Wolfgang,” the Bloodroyal throws a sardonic grin at the shade over his left shoulder, “I will remind you that we are on a mission of diplomacy here. Turning up with an army would be counterproductive at best and provoke a fight we don’t want to have at worst. 50 armed men is the outside of what we can sell as my personal bodyguard. Either way if the demons beneath the Lucidian decide to make an appearance during our crossing we are all fish-food 50 men or 500, but our good man here assures me, this won’t happen, isn’t that right? Master Ewalt?”

A bearded man in a richly embroidered tunic but with hard and callused hands stands up and bows respectfully. “My people have been fishing in the Sund for a hundred years, your grace, including myself and my sons and my father and grandfather before me. We know very well how far we can stray from land until the children of the depth take notice. Worry not. The weather is a greater risk, this early in spring the storms come suddenly and if we are blown on the open sea or broken against the cliffs …”

“Good man. We will try our best to minimize the risk. Daturei!”

Lilith startles, trying to hide her discomfort at suddenly being the centre of attention of the room suddenly being turned on her.

“My lord?”

“You are proficient in weather manipulation?”

Lilith takes a deep breath. “Trying to influence a system of this size and complexity is never a safe bet and it will put an enormous strain on my body, I would advice …”

“I don’t care. You were sent from the Court of Shades and Midnight to assist me on this mission. Can you do it?”

Lilith bites her lip. “I’ll not be able to influence he currents, even so the ritual will have a non-neglect able possibility of killing me. It will be very time limited and the added stain in the system will almost certainly induce a heavy storm once the spell ends, if the situation is on the edge enough that it makes casting necessary at all. I’ll need time and materials to prepare.”

“Acceptable. Talk to Master Sebold and the quarter master of the fortress for whatever you need. On that note, Master Ewalt, Commander, if you good folk would please excuse us? I have to discuss some things with my retainers. ”

Once the local dignitaries have filed out of the room, another Imperial shade, a short, slim man with cold black eyes, bares the door and takes his position next to it.

Hairs on the back of her neck bristling, Lilith carefully eyes the room, two Shades next to the Bloodroyal, one blocking the door, the rest of the Sept nowhere to be seen. Something feels … of.

“Finally. To business.” The Bloodroyal leans forward in his seat and looks at Sigmund. “Well? What songs do our birds sing?”

The portly secretary opens a thick folder of bundled papers while fussily cleaning his glasses.

“It’s an unusual place. Most of the ruling family has been wiped out five years ago by a coup staged by the Briarwoods, a minor noble family, hailing from the Eastfjorde …”

“Marienheim?” The Bloodroyal’s interest is piqued.

“No your highness, further north, around Stellgat. It’s in the file. They first came to the attention of the Court of Watchful Eyes and Whispers in the summer of 73 under suspicion of necromancy. They were declared practitioners of the black, vogelfrei, anathema, enemy to all mankind in early 76, under the imperial writ of the Conclave of Elmberg. The next time they surface is in Whitestone in the spring of 77 taking the town with some trickery and a considerable mercenary force.”

As a practitioner of the arcane Lilith’s ear is closer to the weave, the heartbeat of existence, the strange shadow realm where past, present and future are but threads in the same string, where thoughts and possibility bleed into reality, so she can feel something shifting in the potential in the room. There is no perceptible signs, no additional tension in the frame of the men, no clear signals, only the crown prince flicking his eyes sideways for but a fraction of a heartbeat, his Shade shifting her weight by a minuscule amount and suddenly she feels a pit yawning under their feet.

Sigmund carries on, blissfully unaware or gifted with a truly outstanding poker face. “The only survivors of the former, and current, ruling family retook the castle about 4 months ago. The son, Percival, who had avoided capture, brought in a mercenary band of some renown and his sister Cassandra, who had been the Briarwoods hostage and fig leaf of continuity for the last five years, coordinated an uprising from the citizenry, working as a double agent.”

“Are you telling us that the Tal’dorei Emperor allowed the existence of a known necromancer among his vassals for five years?” Wolfgang seems to be torn between amusement and disgust.

Sigmund shrugs.

“Uriel was a weak Emperor. Disinclined to violence and the rigors of campaign life himself, unwilling to provide any of his generals the popularity boost of a successful campaign, notoriously broke and unable to raise taxes to pay for an expedition, for fear of open revolt by the Merchant Houses, and wholly uninterested in some quasi-independent backwater.

He knew of course that the Briarwoods had conquered Whitestone, but the de Rolos are an old family and proud. They still remember their glory days in Whitestone, when the Tree-and-Sunburst ruled from the Silvercut to the delta of Old Father Kenub and so do the Tal’doreis.

The de Rolos acknowledged the political realities and did lip service to Eman, but I don’t think they ever paid a single gulden of tax and were more or less completely independent. It’s probable Eman simply didn’t quite understand what kind of lice they had contracted and didn’t really care about some up-jumped bandit lord murdering haughty, local nobility.”

“Anyway as I was saying, recent events have left the power structure of Whitestone with some interesting fault lines to exploit. The nominal head of the house is Cassandra de Rolo, 17 years of age, her Brother Percival has the loyalty of a small band of mercenaries with a truly fearsome reputation and a knack for coming up with … very interesting inventions, but the true power of the land is the castellan, Archibald Desnay.

He is the only one with the education and experience to run a city state, the kids are apparently trying the best to learn, but for the time being most of the actual decision default to Archibald, accordingly most of the relevant offices, custom and tax agents, watch captains and mine foremen are his people.”

“Any chance of turning him? Maybe he would like a go at the helm.”

The secretary shakes his head.

“Unlikely in the extreme, unless our estimate of his character is very wrong. The man has spent all his life in the service of the de Rolos, including 5 years of guerilla warfare against a necromancer and vampire. He lost his youngest son the night the castle was taken and three grandsons during various uprisings. His family has served the House de Rolo since before they fled White-Towers-Upon-The-Sea. No dice there, but we might have a different approach.

Our people think he is deeply unhappy with Cassandra as head of house. At the very least he hardly leaves out an opportunity to undermine her authority. If we are reading the signs right there might be some lingering doubts about Cassandra’s true loyalties during her time as a double agent. Possibly he blames the girl for the deaths of his grandsons. At the very least there are rumors in Whitestone, spread by Archibald’s people, we think, that she betrayed the de Rolo loyalists to the Briarwoods.”

“So if the old codger doesn’t want the crown for himself, what does he want?”

“Cassandra removed from the line and he boy, Percival, on the throne, we think.”

Armin is pursuing his lips. “He doesn’t need us for that, not with all the influence he has. A bit of poison in her morning tea and that’s it. So why hasn’t he? And does the girl have any kind of power base?”

“Apart from her personal guard, not much. Give her time, she has been in position for less than 4 months. With Archibald we honestly are not sure. Lingering loyalty, maybe? Fear of what will happen if Percival finds out? People like Archibald tend to be loyal to the house above all and if he kills Cassandra and her brother finds out, his choice is between ending the line, he has spent his life serving, and the hangman’s noose.”

“So he wants somebody to kill the girl, while he keeps his hands clean.” The Bloodroyal drums his fingers on the table. “Easy enough in principle. Tiny problem though. If the girl suddenly turns up dead, we certainly will be the prime suspect, which is a difficult position to be in, while trying to negotiate an alliance. Especially, if we actually send the knife.”

Sigmund folds his hand on top of his file. “The Court of Whispers advices to initiate talks with all three of them and throw our support behind the most favorable outcome, assuming the official talks fail.

It would be best to convince Percival, as Archibald will almost certainly fall in line behind him. Even better if we can make a deal with Archibald directly but we don’t think that likely. The girl is less valuable because of her limited influence, but in a pinch we could try to build a coup around her and we think we could cultivate her as a source. Apparently there are some lingering hard feelings on her side from the night of the original coup, although we are not entirely sure about the specifics. Also she is smart enough to notice that she is nothing but a figurehead and resends the experience. “

The Bloodroyal is slowly pacing in front of the heart fire. “You have given me much to think about Sigmund. Cultivate her, but a coup is only acceptable to us, if we can take her brother alive.”

“It might be wise to remember, the girl has already survived five years as a double, possibly triple, agent. She is still here, her enemies are not.” The short Shade by the door has spoken up suddenly, his voice clear and cutting like a war bell. Judging from several startled turns of head, most of the room had not even been aware of his presence.

The Bloodroyal sighs deeply and fills a mug from the pitcher of hot mulled wine on the side table, the scent of nutmeg and cloves heavy on the air.

“A valid point. Sigmund consider that, when talking to the girl. The rest of you return to you duties, please.”

Lilith quickly rises from her chair and makes for the door, when the commanding voice of the crown prince rings out.

“A moment of your time Daturei. You too, Sigmund.” The Bloodroyal has retaken his seat in front of the fire and beckons them closer.

Most of the council members take no notice, absorbed deeply into quiet conversation. Commander Wolfgang gives a respectful nod, while filing out of the door; Lilith returns a tight smile.

Smoothly like a dagger slipping from a well-oiled shed a black-dressed figure slides between her and the exit.

Hesitantly Lilith steps closer, feels more than she sees the black shades of two additional members of the imperial Sept, slipping into the room, quite as death, closing the door soundlessly behind them.

The quite snap of the engaging lock is very loud in the stillness of the room.

Sigmund’s is unfailingly polite, friendly and apparently either entirely unaware or unimpressed by the thin ice under their feet.

“How might we be of service, my lord?”

The Bloodroyal slowly rotates his wine goblet in front of his face, piercing green eyes watching them over the brim. Finally he takes a sib.

“No matter what you people might think, I’m young but not an idiot. Five years ago, a minor noble couple in the eastern marches was declared practitioners of the black, vogelfrei. Every hand raised against them, every door closed to them. And yet … and yet they managed to cross the width of the empire unmolested, their retainers in tow, organize passage in Blacksund and have enough funds leftover to hire a substantial number of mercenaries.  

This has your grubby little handprints all over it, Sigmund.

The succession to throne, the very fate of the Empire might depend on the outcome of this mission. My fate. So I want you to consider your answer to my next question very carefully.”

Lilith’s heartbeat is thundering in her ears, but she can still hear the whisper quite _shink_ of a blade leaving its scabbard behind her.

“Did either the Court of Midnight or the Court of Whispers have any involvement with the Briarwoods? Money, weapons, sell-swords, blind eyes turned? And if so to what end?”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hints of plot at the beginning, quickly disintegrating into porn.
> 
> The change-over is clearly marked.
> 
> Unbetaed as always. All mistakes are mine.

Their mad dash through the snow goes by in a blur of white and icy wind. Vex is an excellent horse woman but Pike has always preferred her own two feet and the gentle mare, the guards gave her, is doing her best to keep up with the break neck speed that Vex is setting with her chestnut stallion.

The saddle is trying its best to compress her spine to half the original length, she can’t feel either her fingers or her buttocks and is shivering uncontrollably by the time the horses clatter under the portcullis and storm through the snow covered town towards Whitestone castle.

Exhaustion or not, Pike is conscious enough to notice signs of construction everywhere. Huge piles of fresh lumber are left out to air dry next to a half-constructed building on the mill-pond, a half-finished, brick smokestack rising into the evening air. The manor house closest to the gates is growing two extra wings and a whole section of decrepit hovels has been replaced by sturdy new timber houses, constructed around the winter barren black earth of communal vegetable gardens.

The chimneys are spitting smoke and sparks and Pike coughs, pulling up next to Vex in the castle yard, who is already handing her reigns to a stable boy swaddled in half a dozen cloaks.

“Is it just me or is the smoke thicker than a month ago?”

Vex shakes her head. “They sent the first golem down in the coal mines. It doesn’t care about the cold, it doesn’t get tired, doesn’t sleep and the new pumps are helping, too, so we have a daily supply of coal to distribute among the citizens. You need to eat less, if you can stay warm at least, so that helps. Come on.”

She pivots on the ball of her left foot and calls the gate guard on duty, a wiry veteran with one eye, who has stepped from his heated guard house to inspect them.

“Reinhold! Where is his Lordship?”

“Couldn’t say milady, but the Lady Cassandra left word for you, to attend her in her study as soon as you are back.”

Pike more falls of her horse then she dismounts and massages feeling back into her legs.

Vex pulls her to her feet. “Come on. It’s warmer inside.”

In the council chambers Cassandra is talking quietly to a muscular man of early middle age; skin the color of old oak wood, clothed in well-made but simple leather armor with the Tree-and-Sunburst of Whitestone emblazoned on the chest; a single wax-sealed, message cylinder sits on top of the table between them. Pike is more interested in the hot mulled wine, the left-over slice of meat pie and the fire which is crackling inside the enormous tiled stove.

They interrupt their conversation when Vex and Pike enter, Cassandra's greeting is respectful but cool. 

“What’s the emergency, Cassandra? Where is your brother? Taryon was singularly unhelpful and I nearly killed my horse to get here as quickly as I could.”

 Vex takes a breath and greets the man.

“Jarrett, it’s good to see you. I hope you are in good health.”

Cassandra rises from her seat. “I have send for my brother, alas he remains elusive. He came in from the construction side of the new plague house at noon and disappeared beneath the castle. I thought it best to contain this information, so I send word to everyone to gather as soon as I heard.”

Cassandra smiles sharply. “I’m sure Percival will be with us shortly, running from the world is an old habit for my brother. I have servants scouring the underground passages for him. Wherever he is hiding they will find him soon enough. Let’s wait for him, so we don’t have to go over this several times.”

Pike collapses in a chair and reaches for a tankard of hot tea and a slice of meat pie. “Fine with me. Hi Jarrett.”

The guard captain smiles tightly. “A pleasure to have you with us again, Lady Pike.”

Vex snorts impatiently and starts pacing in front of the hearth, while Pike digs into the leftovers of Cassandra’s evening meal.

Finally there are footsteps outside of the door. Percival enters with Archibald leaning on his arm, Pike jumps of her chair and is half-way across the room before her brain catches up with her feet. _Not the time or the place, girl._ She covers by taking Archibald’s other arm but can’t stop her dopey grin, when Percy winks at her. Apparently the boy has been taking lessons from Vex.

“Well, what’s so damn important, then?” Archibald shuffles forward and drops heavily into a chair, cantankerously eyeing the group assembled around the council table.

“Speak, boy.”

Jarrett rises from his seat and sketches a bow.

“As you say, milord.” He clears his throat and addresses the assembled council members. “The Husland delegation is currently in Blacksund trying to organize passage over straits. We will need someone to greet them on our side and guide them over the mountain roads.”

Archibald rumbles. “The Lady Vex’ahlia is high ranking enough that no insult should be taken and the grey hunt contains our best scouts so this should be an easy choice.”

Vex’s eyes have gone wide as saucers and Percy, too, seems less than pleased.

“Let the man finish before we start handing out assignments, Archibald. Jarrett?”

“The delegation leader is of much higher rank, than we anticipated. Eren Wendel, adopted grandson of old man Wendel himself and, now that his father has disappeared, the prime candidate for Jäger-in-waiting. He is bringing nearly a hundred people with him.”

Everyone starts talking at once, until Archibald hammers his walking stick against the table.

“Silence. Silence you ingrates. Are you finished, boy?”

“No, Sir. I can give you a more detailed report later, but I had long talks with their quarter master and the captain of their guard and a short audience with the Bloodroyal himself. The good news is, they know about our situation and they are bringing a considerable amount of grain, potatoes and salt-fish as a show of good-will, so at least we will not have to worry about feeding them.”

Percy snorts. “I’m not yet prepared to call that good news, but do carry on. What’s the bad news?”

Jarrett sighs. “Weather hit us hard when we returned over the sund. Our boat capsized, Merwin drowned and Harold was dragged out to sea by the current. That’s bad enough but when our boat was washed ashore, we went in to recover some of our belongings. Most had been lost to the Lucidian, but we found this affixed with wax to the bottom of a bench.”  He holds up the sealed message cylinder.

“It doesn’t belong to any of my men or the fishermen, transporting us, or at least nobody will admit to it. I think they are trying to communicate with someone inside Whitestone and I think one of my men has been in on it.”

The silence stretches long and tense after Jarrett has finished.

Finally Cassandra picks up the message cylinder.

“Where are your men?”

“In the barracks. I told the duty sergeant to keep an eye on them. He is reliable.”

Archibald snorts contemptuously, “And the men you picked for this task, were not?”

Jarrett’s face is stony. “To the best of my knowledge all my people are loyal.”

“Clearly the best of you knowledge is not good enough.”

Percy raises a hand. “Peace Archibald. Let the man talk. Who found this?”

Jarrett sighs. “Osmund brought it to me. He was trying to reach his schnaps bottle. It rolled beneath the rear bench and got stuck when the boat cap-sized.”

“That’s good to know. Did you open the message cylinder?”

Jarrett shakes his head. “No. There is a ward on it. I’m pretty sure it would melt my eyeballs if I tried.”

Percival hums, “Fair. Show me that, please.”

He carefully inspects the arcane sigils inscribed on the message cylinder, before he holds it out to the Gnome Cleric.  “Pike? Can you tell us anything about this?”

Pike’s ears are twitching nervously, uncomfortable with the attention of the room suddenly being turned to her.

“Arcane conjuration equations are not really my specialty. I can tell it’s some kind of warding, but we already knew that. If anyone with the wrong soul signature tries to read the message, the ward lashes out. I guess I could try to dissolve it but that’s … that’s more of a sledgehammer than a lock-pick. It might release the trigger, or any secondary traps in the rune equation. It could destroy the message.”

Pike shrugs, feels the weight of the heavy armor against her sore muscles. “I can do it, but it’s not a sure thing. I would recommend everyone to keep a healthy distance. All things considered I would feel more comfortable if Gilmore or Eskil or anyone else with knowledge of rune equations would give it a shake. Where is Eskil anyway?”

“In Feldran. They have an outbreak of measles there and with people being weakened by the rationing, we had to stomp on this before it spreads, so we send every healer we had.”

“Oh.” Pike sighs heavily and clambers of her chair. “That’s what? Six hours on horseback? If the roads are clear I can be there by midnight.”

“Not tonight.” Percy’s hand falls on her shoulder, gently pressing her back in her seat, his thumb barely touching the side of her neck, where she took off her gorget to eat. She can feel the heat of the tiny sliver of skin, her heartbeat suddenly reverberating like war drum in her rib cage and sacks back into her seat, nodding mutely.

He smiles warmly at her and says. “You can go in the morning. Take a nights rest, the mountain paths are treacherous in the dark.”

The rest of the council meeting passes in a blur, Pike dozing through most of it, lulled to sleep by the warmth of the fire with Percy’s steady presence on her left and Vex’s lithe form to her right.

When Vex shakes her awake, only Percival is left bend over a file folder on the table and Vex is standing next to her chair, pulling the gnome to her feet.

“Come on sweetness. Let’s get you out of this armor and into a hot bath.”

Pike yawns like a roaring lion and stretches, scratching her behind. “Capital idea.”

Vex turns at the door and looks back at their boy, still sitting at the table and cocks an eyebrow at him.

“Well, are you coming?”

Percy looks up startled.

“I still have to complete some files and I wanted to look into making some progress on the third golem, Terry was teaching some of the blacksmiths how to do the power transmission but with him gone, I’ll have …

“Percival.”

“Yes, dear?”

“I’m tired, I’m dirty, I’m saddle sore. I’m going to take our girlfriend to the baths, wash her and shave her pussy, and then we are going to bed and make love until we can’t come anymore. If you want to join, you are more than welcome, if you would rather work on your box of bolts, … well I’m sure there will be a next time.”

Vex grabs Pike’s hand, pulling the gnome after her. “Whenever you are ready, dear.”

PORN – PORN – PORN – PORN – PORN – PORN

“I look ridiculous.”

“Nonsense, dear. You look good enough to eat, which I will, if you will let me.”

Pike’s white linen shift is open to the sides, held together only by a gold leaf belt around her narrow waste, pointy nipples and full, gravity defying breasts pushing against material transparent with oil, making her skin shimmer like liquid gold in the lamp light.

“I don’t think I can make this work. Maybe he won’t even show up.”

Vex, lounging on the bed, wearing the same kind of belt with a tiny silk loincloth fastened to it, but otherwise nude as the day she was born, with flowering vines of gold paint, winding along her long, lithe bronze limps, sighs and rolls on her back.

“Trust me he will be here soon. He knows how much time we take in the baths and he might be a prideful fool, but not so much that he will makes us wait too long. If it really makes you uncomfortable go and put something on. We will fuck you, potato sack or not, but you look beautiful like this.

Honestly it’s probably a waste; the boy hasn’t come for nearly five weeks. If not for the spell, he would take one look at you and shoot into his pants.”

Pike gives her a disapproving glance. “I wish you wouldn’t do that. Make him wait like that.”

Vex’s eyes have a hard glint in them. “When you are here, you can manage his orgasms, as you see fit but you weren’t, so it falls to me. Percival has no complaints so please …”

“He is not going to leave you, just because you are not rationing out when he gets to feel good.”

“I’m not … Pike I really don’t want to deal with this right now and not everything is about my imaginary abandonment issues. It’s our first alone time together in weeks, let’s not argue. Here.”

She thrusts a calligraphy brush coated in gold paint at Pike and drags a fingernail from the pink pearl of her hard clit to the mirror smooth mound of her sex.

“Paint me here. You are much better with the brush and if you are not going to eat me out until we are all here, it’s the least you can do.”

Pike sighs and dips the brush into a small bowl, filled with gold paint. “What do you want?”

“A Whitestone tree. To show where I belong.”

The gnome girl bites her lips and nods, painting delicate lines of gold on smooth bronze skin. The brush caresses her hard clit and Vex sighs breathily her eyes fluttering shut.

“Just like that sweetness, I …”

The door is unlocked and they both turn their heads, Pike dropping the brush.

The door clicks shut behind Percival and Pike’s legs seem to develop a will of their own, because they catapult her of the bed and carry her at a sprint in his embrace.

He smells of mint, hot metal, gun powder and faintly of musk, his clothes like freshly laundered sunshine and starch. She clamps her arms around his waist and buries her face in his shirt.

“Missed you so much baby-boy.”

She feels Percival dropping a kiss on the crown of her head, burying his face in her platinum locks. “You smell like summer and honey wine.”

Pike groans and hides her delighted grin in his chest. “You are spending too much time with Terry. What’s with the purple prose?”

Percy just smiles unperturbed and rakes his eyes over her, leaving her flushed and breathless.

The awkward gnome girl, in love with a boy, twice her size and half her age, wants to curl in a ball and hide beneath the blankets, the fearless warrior wants to use all available weapons to bring down her quarry, cock her hips and thrust the breasts forward and wink like Vex, the harlot in her just wants.

“Clearly I’m drunk on your presence.”

“Buuuh.” Vex is sniggering behind her but Percy’s sudden corniness none withstanding her heart skips a beat.

“You are not doing your reputation as a diplomat any favors today, darling boy.”

She stands up straighter and gently pulls on his shirt.

“Be a good boy and kneel, Percival. Hands behind your back, beautiful.”

She takes his face into her hands, kisses his nose, his eyes and finally his mouth, first gently and probing, then swirling her tongue around his. Percy moans into her mouth, pressing his forehead against hers, his body molding against her muscular form. She can feel the hardness of his growing erection against her stomach, the hard planes of his chest flattening her full breasts.

She steps back, her lips kiss swollen, to catch her breath, spiders her fingers over his chest to feel his thundering heartbeat.

“Strip. I want to see you, beautiful boy.” Pike turns to Vex, hart muscle and soft curves spread over the silk bed sheets, skin shimmering like hammered bronze in the candlelight and beckons her over.

“Help our boy, slave girl, then bind his hands.” Eyes dark with lust, Vex glides from the bed, the gold paint accenting her nude form and strides over to Percy, hips swinging like a metronome, golden arm rings clinking. The belt of artfully hammered gold leaves emphasizes her narrow waste and the faint outline of her abdominals, a thin strip of transparent, sodden silk, clings to the smooth swell of her sex and her swollen lips.

“Look how beautiful he is, Mistress. Hands up, please Percival.”

Vex pulls his shirt over his head, folds it carefully before painting the outline of his arm muscles with her fingertips, ghosting her hands over the smooth outline of his armpit.

“Ah, ah, baby boy. I didn’t say you could lower your arms again.” She presses an open-mouthed kiss on his nape, flattening her breasts against his back, while tenderly caressing his bare chest with the soft brush strokes of her fingers.

Nuzzling behind his ear she mouths breathily in his ear, “Do you want me to unlace your trousers and expose you hard, needy cock?”

“Yes, mistress.”

“Good boy.” She brushes a single finger along the bulge in his pants, presses her body against his back. “Honest boys get rewarded.” Her nimble fingers slowly begin unlacing his pants.

Vex meets Pike’s half-lidded gaze over Percival shoulder, her platinum-blond locks wild, face flushed Pike is sprawling among the pillows, her hard pink nipples clearly visible through her silk shift, transparent with oil. Spreading her legs obscenely wide Pike lifts her shift, showing miles of leg and the smooth, hairless swell of burnt umber skin above the swollen, pink folds of her sex. Her nimble fingers are slowly, dreamily caressing her lips.

“Do you see what you do to our mistress? How wet she is? The obscene squelching noises her wet pussy is making? The strings of her juices hanging from her fingers?

What you do to me? Do you know how many times I had to masturbate thinking about you? Stretched out and bound and helpless before me, the way you tremble and moan when I slide my ivory cock into you. The way your hard cock spasms, dripping per-cum on your stomach, when I grind against that place inside you, that makes you feel so good.”

“You promised you wouldn’t come as long as I could not.” Percy’s voice is breathless and reproachful with just an edge of whininess creeping in. 

She has stripped him off his boots and trousers and is palming his hard penis, rolling back his foreskin.

“I know baby-boy, I know, but it’s your fault, too, for looking so beautiful. I didn’t mean to, I had you tied to our bed, your whole body flushed, your eyes all needy and wanton, while I was worshipping your cock. I took you so deep in my throat, I could feel every vibration, every twitch, heat spreading from my stuffed throat, my pussy clenching around empty air. And you looked at me like I was all you ever wanted, like I was precious and I came. I wasn’t even touching myself but I came.”

She buries her beet-red face in his thick hair to hide, suddenly and inexplicably embarrassed.

“I didn’t do it on purpose, hell, I didn’t even know that was possible. Afterwards I just couldn’t stop myself. My clit was just sooo swollen and needy all the time, when I thought about you. Your eye-lashes so long and fine, resting on your cheeks in the morning before you wake; your forearms when you roll up your shirtsleeves; your beautiful blue eyes;  your hard, pink cock and smooth heat-pink skin when I shave you in the bath.”

Gently she bites his earlobe and hisses: “I flicked my clit and jammed my oak-wood dildo into my ass, rode it hard, pretending it was your cock, until I came all over the floor in our bedroom. “

Pikes meets her gaze over Percy’s shoulder, three fingers working her shiny pussy with obscene wet sounds, while Vex leans in and whispers into his ear: “I licked up my juices from the floor, pretending my hands were bound behind my back, imagining how Pike would punish me for being so selfish. Do you want to see that baby-boy?”

“Yes, please mistress.”

Percy groans, when she rubs her thumb over the underside of his cock head, his arms trembling over his head. Trailing kisses up the side of his neck, Vex asks: “Do you want me to bind your hands, baby-boy?”

“Yes, mistress.”

Slowly she winds coils of smooth velvet rope around first his wrists and then his elbows, until his slim, but wiry-muscular arms are pulled tight behind his back, elbows nearly touching.

“Do you want to come?”

“It is not for me to say, mistress.”

“So obedient. Such a good boy.”

“The decision is yours, mistress.”

“No, it’s not.” Pike slides to the edge of the bed, her legs spread wide. “Vex will have to learn to wait her turn. You come her baby-boy; I’ll take care of you tonight. No walking please, good boys crawl.”

“Yes mistress.”

With his hands bound on his back, Percy has to drag his body over the soft aurochs pelts covering the floor, whimpering quietly when his hard member rubs over the silky fur.

Pike’s strong little hands cup his face, gently brushing the hair from his eyes.

“You didn’t look after yourself as you promised darling boy and I’m disappointed. Your health is not a game as we play it here, so I’ll not punish you, but I want you to know that you hurt me.”

“Pike, I …”

“Be quite boy, your mistress is talking. Your health is important to us, you are important to us. I did not sign up to be in a relationship with a self-destructive wreck of a man. I want to spend decades with my beautiful boy, not with a dead hero.  If you cannot get a handle on your urge for needless self-sacrifice I’ll have to draw the consequences at some point and protect myself and Vex. Are we clear? Say, yes, Pike.”

Percy can’t meet her eye and visibly has to gather his courage. “Pike, my city …”

She kisses him to shut him up. “I know, gods damn you. I’m not asking you, not to protect your people. Just remember there are people that need you, and maybe, occasionally, use a bit of common sense?”

Percy sighs into her kiss and relaxes into her arms. “Yes, Pike.”

“Good. Kneel over my lap please, Percival. This is not for hurting me with your self-destructive behavior. This is for forcing me spending precious time on lecturing you, when I wanted to make love with you instead.”

She caresses  his ivory buttocks, the dark honey of her hands, contrasting beautifully with his pale skin tone, brushes her finger over the soft pink skin of his anus, grasps his heavy, swollen penis with her left, slowly massaging it.

“Count to ten, beautiful.”

Her right comes down hard on his behind, leaving a pink hand print on his ivory skin, her left caressing his hard cock. Percy whimpers into the soft pillows, a sound half-way between pain and want.

“One.”

Vex has taken a seat next to them, leaning against the carved bed post, slowly working the thick ivory strap-on in and out of her slick sex but when Percy whimpers in pain, she acts on pure instinct, gathers him in her arms, buries his face into her breasts, making cooing noises as the blows rain down on his buttocks.

“Suuush, baby boy it will be over in but a moment. Shuuuush.”

When Pike is done, his face is wet with tears, his breath coming fast and hard. Vex smoothes his hair back, kisses him slow and deep, while Pike spreads oil on his stinging cheeks, massages the thick, cool liquid carefully into his cock and anus, slips oil slick fingers into his heat, coating his insides.

In silent apology she rains kisses over the red handprints on his ass, swirls her tongue around his opening, while gently dragging her fingernail along the seam of his penis.

The gnome girl inserts the smaller end of the two-headed strap-on into her slick pussy, shuddering lustfully and tightens the straps around her legs and hips.

“First I wanted you to bounce on my ivory cock, but I think I have a better idea. Vex, please help me.”

They stretch him out on the silk sheets on his back, limps fastened to the posts of the bed, defenseless and beautiful.

Pike bites her lip, Percy has lost weight and he didn’t have much to spare to begin with. There is gauntness to his face, even flushed and tear-stained, and a hollow forming beneath his ribs, when lying on his back, pelvic bones protruding slightly.

She blows on his erection, brushing her long pale hair over his prostrate body, watches the curtain of platinum blonde strands whisper over his chest and hard nipples, caress his hard stomach and whisper around his straining, pulsing cock.

Pike slips a soft cushion beneath his bruised buttocks and kneels between his widely spread legs, resting her right on top of his chest, feels his wildly beating heart, while her left smears oil over her smooth ivory  of her phallus.

“Percival?”

“Yes, mistress?”

“Do you know how much we love you?”

“Yes mistress.”

Pike smiles happily and caresses the taut skin of his balls. “Do you want me take this thing off? I’ll not have you suffer for our insecurities. Your needs must always come first.”

Her boy bites his lip adorably and shakes his head, white hair flopping in his eyes.

“I enjoy being made to wait. It should be up to you, Pike.”

The submissive trust in his eyes makes her mouth go dry. She spiders the flat of her hand over his chest, where she can feel his heart beat and smiles at him:

“I’m going to make you feel so good, just you wait.”

She breathes another command word at the gold snake knotted around his smooth balls, watches as it winds upwards around his hard cock, tongue flickering over the back of his glans than slowly, carefully slipping into his urethra. The snake hisses, its whole body gently vibrating.

Percy groans and shudders in his bounds.

Pike is watching him carefully. “Does that feel good, sweetie? Do you want it out?”

“Nooo-o, it’s strange but not unpleasant.”

“Good boy. Tell me, just before you feel you can’t control your urge to come anymore. Maybe we can train you to resist temptation and increase your pleasure without this thing on. Would you like that baby-boy? Do you want to make me proud?” 

“Yes, mistress.”

Whispering praise, Pike carefully slides the strap-on into him, fearfully searching his face for any signs of pain. When she bottoms out in him, her sex pressing against his buttocks, his eyes are wide, his face flushed, his lips kiss swollen, his breath coming in short hard gasps.

Vex, who has been watching her exchange with shining eyes, idly twisting her nipple, leans forward to grasp his cock but Pike slaps her hand away.

“No you don’t, greedy girl. You may kiss him on the mouth and you may use your feathers on him, but nothing else until you have atoned for your sins.”

Vex’s eyes flash dangerously and for a moment Pike thinks she will object her ruling, before she lowers her head.

Pike grasps Percy’s hips and rolls her pelvis forward; experimenting until she finds the angle that makes him rise of the bed to meet her gentle thrusts.

Vex has plucked a feather from her inky locks and whispering the silky, soft strands over his arms and armpits to his chest and nipples and finally over his twitching cock.

When his whimpers have changed to needy keening, Pike stops grinding against his prostate and watches him thrust upwards, searching for friction, contact, relief.

The feather caresses the seam of his penis and Percy groans.

“Please, please mistress. Help me. I’m so close.”

Vex is furiously fingering her pussy, hands wet and shiny with her juices, but interrupts her need to let him suck her fingers clean, before she leans down to taste herself on his lips.

Pike gently presses him back down on the mattress, hand on his pelvic bone.

“Shshhhh. Not yet, beautiful. Just a bit longer.”

He struggles against her hands holding him down, his penis pulsing slowly, discharging a trickle of precum.

Vex combs soft white-hair, dark with sweet from his brow, and kisses him languorously until he is panting and breathless.

“Don’t concentrate on her, baby-boy. Look at me, concentrate on you breathing. You can do this. Flex the muscles in your beautiful cock. You are strong, a magnificent stallion and you will not come to until your mistress is pleased.”

Pike casts a command rune on the gold-snake that unfurls, flows upwards like liquid metal into his urethra. She can feel the vibrations of the smooth golden plug through the silky, hard flesh of his cock.

The slow careful grinding of her strap-on into him prolongs his shuddering agony for half an hour, but by then Pike is reaching the end of her rope. Her clit is pulsating in time with her heart-beat and a steady stream of wetness is trickling from her pussy.

She sheds the harness and pulls out a padded glass vile, which she has protected like the apple of her eye on her journey from Westruun, unseals it and downs the contents in a single gulp.

When she opens her eyes again, she is half a head larger than Percy and so completely unused to her new proportions, she nearly hits her head on the canopy when climbing on top of the mattress.

Her lovers watch her wide-eyed, Vex is much to baffled to offer resistance, when Pike gently pulls her to one post and binds her hands to it.

“Pike … what …?”

“Enlargement potion.” Pike grins giddily. “I’m going to ride him until he has come in my mouth and my sex and my ass and if you are a good girl and promise not to be so selfish in future, I’ll let you suck his come from my pussy and my anus."

Pike bends foreward to kiss her lover on the mouth.

"Are you going to be a good girl?”

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unbetaed as always.
> 
> No porn.

The first grey light of dawn is seeping through the windows, when Percival opens the door to his study but his ghosts and the old man are already waiting for him. The castellan is grumpily lounging in the window seat, wreathed in the foul smelling pipe smoke like the craggy cliffs of the Sierras on a foggy October morning.

Anna leans against the wall behind him, daintily dabbing blood from her tight bullet smile with the same amount of careful precision with which she mixed chemical compounds and flensed flesh from bone.

Percy sighs and pours himself a cup of tea, the servants know his habits so the iron stove is already fired and the water hot.

“Good morning, Archibald.”

“No, it’s not. Well maybe for you, if the sounds coming from your bed-chamber are any indication.”

Percy eyebrows climb all the way to his hairline. Anna is mirroring his expression behind Archibald, her whole expression a rictus of shocked, virginal propriety. Percy bites his lip to stop himself from laughing.

“Aren’t you a bit too old to listen at other people’s bedroom doors, Archie?”

Archibald grunts. “Of course I am. I pay people for that.”

“Mind enlightening me, how my bed chamber is relevant to any of our current problems?”

Sighing the old man picks up his tea cup and stars out of his window into the morning fog. The silence stretches until Percy has to fight the juvenile impulse to fidget as if he is twelve again and in one of Archibald’s arithmetic lessons. He is just about to poke the old man to see if he has fallen asleep in his chair, when the castellan pulls another message cylinder from his cloak and throws it on the desk.

“News from my people in Eman. Warmaster Daxio is dead. Assassinated. So is the Head of the Clasp. Two thirds of the new council is decorating iron spikes on the walls, the rest is on the run.”

Percy snatches up the message, unrolls the parchment and hastily scans the message.

“No mention of Allura Vysoren.”

Archibald shrugs. “Unconfirmed, but she hasn’t shown up here and with the snow blocking the roads the news is old and stale, so probably a nameless corpse in a ditch somewhere. Eman has no lack of those.”

Pery sacks back into his chair, gently massaging the bridge of his nose. He thinks of the mild-tempered arcanist, the way he last saw, her disarming, steel-under-silk, smile brimming with optimism.

“What happened? This wasn’t Husland, was it?”

The old man sighs and shakes his head.

“What, hiding an army in the breeches of the three suicidal idiots that actually braved the passes and roads this time of the year? Of course not. Well, maybe the Court of Whispers had their fingers in this pie, but if so we will never know.

No, this has been a long time coming. Let this be a lesson to you boy, rulers can and do kill poor folk by the wagonload. Mostly through neglect, not enough to eat, bad hygiene, no clean water or Temple healers. Normally it’s not a problem, poor men die quietly. The slums in Eman killed more men, than any orc horde in any given year.

There is, however, a tipping point at which point, neither ingrained fear, nor tradition, nor paid swords, will keep the mob from your door.

A devastating dragon attack and months of famine, plundering lizard men war bands and pestilence and we are just about there, apparently.”

Percy has taken up the note again and is reading again, more carefully this time.

“The trading houses were trying to recover their gold from the dragon hord, the city assembly wanted to use it to charter ships and brave the winter storms, buy as much grain as they could in Marquet to feed all those hungry mouths. The clasp leadership and the council were intending to go along with the trading houses.”

Archibald snorts, “Of course they did, the short sighted fools. Three quarters of that gold was theirs.”

Percival turns the page, “So the city assembly rose up, the regiments rebelled, a coup from the inside and they slaughtered the council and most of the officer corps.”

“Also every noble, guild master and everyone they could find with more than half a copper piece to their name. Unwashed animals.”

Anna smiles her skull smile, her tight, bloodless lips caressing the shell of his ear with her pungent carrion breath. _“Lambs to the slaughter, repaying the sins of their sirs. Blood for blood.”_

Percy sighs and shakes his head trying to dislodge a thought, “Well to be fair, all these great leaders had just agreed to abandon them to the famine because they didn’t want to share their gold.”

The castellan snorts, annoyed. “This is no joking matter, boy. The cheese mongers took power from a man of noble blood and it took them less than a month to rile their subjects up enough for the streets to run red with blood. Not surprising to be honest, after all the peasants traded one yoke for fifty, each and every one of them determined to squeeze their serfs to the last copper penny.

Either way, if this infection spreads, this house, this legacy, this family will be in peril. One more reason, if you need any more, to bring in the Empire and sooner rather than later.”

Percival can feel his hackles rising. “I’m sorry, Archibald, I’m confused. Didn’t you argue fiercely against seizing food reserves from the merchants and land holding farmers and the rationing, less than … what? Three weeks ago? And now suddenly the peasants will slit our throats in the night, if I don’t marry into the imperial family, yesterday. Could you please make up your mind?”

“Don’t pretend to be even more stupid than you already are, son. House de Rolo made enemies among influential people with that short-sighted decision …”

“… and rescued a considerable number of its subjects from a slow and creeping death, but never mind your priorities …”

“… which will mean shit-all to them, if they will be subsisting of shoe leather soon anyway.”

Archibald hammers a bundle of papers on the table like an executioner’s axe.

“You have run the numbers. Even assuming fortunate winds, fully loaded, the airship will need something like 25 days for a round trip to Vasselheim. That means between 100 and 200 deaths, if we keep everyone on starvation rations and empty out our treasury to keep the ship flying. On the plus side it will be mostly useless mouths, the very old, the very young, the sick and the poor. Get rid of the corpses quickly and hope to Pelor we won’t get a visit from the grim reaper, because the plague will hold a terrible harvest with that many people week from hunger.

At least five to six times that death toll if we rely on what we have. Expulsion of the refugees and prioritizing the rations of important people like able-bodied soldiers, smiths, craftsmen, farmers will be necessary at that point and the estimate remains overly optimistic in my opinion.

Or next to none if we get a trade deal with Husland. The round trip time to Hallstadt will be about three days. Less if the empire will support us by running supply caravans to the straits.”

Archibald’s bony finger stabs down on the parchment.

“This decision and the consequences are yours … and yours alone. You don’t need to worry about a short-tempered old man but blame or glory you will have to answer to the dead.”

Archibald is staring him down unblinkingly with Ripley looming over his left shoulder like a demented parrot and he can hear her silent lips forming words.

“What will you tell them, when their restless spirits come for you?”

_You had it coming, cunt._

Percival turns his face to the flames, crackling in the hearth and thinks of black and winding smoke, strangling half-formed dreams; all the promises he wanted to keep and the ever shorter, contradictory list, he might actually be able to fulfill.

“I wanted to be with the people I love?”

“Love.” The old man hacks up phlegm and spits into fireplace. “Your … what? Twenty-one and in love with the first pair of tits to roger you good. Son, you wouldn’t know love if it bit you in the ass. No disrespect intended but might I remind you that the interest of the fair lady seemed to intensify enormously once she realized that you are the heir of a considerable fortune?”

Percival bites the inside of his cheek hard, focuses on the pain, sharp and bright against the hate welling up from his lungs and heart like black smoke, bright little embers of murder like burning sparks in the rolling black clouds.

Part of him wants to smash his fists into the old man’s beady little eyes, the beaked nose and the shabby black coat like an enormous, envious carrion crow.

Anna cackles silently. _Shoot him down bang, bang. A piece of lead for the sinners, a piece of lead for the saints, crone or child, babe or battle master, they die all the same, bang, bang._

“When is the last time you have spoken to your wife, Archibald? Did you already have your customary five words of conversation for this year? Anyone waiting for you at home but your man servant?”

“No one. All my sons and grandsons have ridden the flames to the dawn father. ” The castellan smiles coldly. “All of them fell under the Tree-and-Sunburst, doing their duty. Will you shame their memory by sacrificing less? You are the Lord of this city, master of law and life and death. Either you hold up you end of the bargain or you stop pretending.”

“I’m not …”

A liver spotted, claw-like hand closes around his wrist with surprising strength.

“Don’t semantic me Percival. You sister may carry the title but I know only one Master of the Silverstone Chair.”

The old man leans back into his chair, dapping sweat off his brow.

“Doubt what you must boy, but never doubt that I have loved, that I love. Not Catherine maybe, ours was a political match more motivated by mutual respect than passion. But I love this city and its people and I have always loved you and your sister, better than I loved my own children, gods forgive me.”

Percy snorts contemptuously. “You have a particular way of showing your affection. I don’t think you have so much as looked at Cassandra, since we retook the city.”

“I wasn’t talking about the brat. There shall be no lies between you and me, son. I don’t trust the little traitor further than I can throw your tame brute.

Your father thought you an eccentric disappointment; your mother would have abandoned her whole brood in a heartbeat for a place at the court of Eman, the half-elf will drop you like a wormy apple for the cut-throat or the bear or enough gold.

But you … you have a spine of like refined whitestone, cold and strong and you will remember the face of your father. You will do the right thing and together we will make you the best ruler this city has seen in a hundred years.”

His shaking hand grasps Percy’s wrist again and squeezes, his eyes intense and unblinking.

“Vesper was the natural leader but she is no more and we will have to make do. You have the blood of kings and emperors and the hard, cold edge that separates the good from the truly great. Together son, we will change the world.”

Anna grins over his head, mouthing the words along with the old man.

_Together we will change the world._

***

Percival finds Pike in the stable yard, silver hair shimmering like hammered white gold in the winter sun, freckled cheeks flushed from the cold wind. Stablemen and servants are strapping barrels and satchels to six mules, while Pike tightens the saddle strap on her animal.

“You sure you don’t want to take some guards to watch your back? At least a handful, the roads are not safe, not even so close to Whitestone.”

Pike turns and smiles brightly and a finger of sunlight breaks through the drifting clouds, plating the dirty snow and cobblestones of the yard in gold. 

“Don’t be such a gloomy goose, no self-respecting highway man is waiting around along the path to a god forsaken nest like Feldran. Even if they did they would have perished of boredom or frozen their behinds to the ground a long time ago. Anyway Vex will send one of her scouts as a guide and Grog is coming along, sooo …”

Percy hums satisfied. “That’s alright then. What’s all this?”

“Keeper Yennen asked for supplies from the plague house and I also will take Johannes with me, so it’s his luggage and supplies, too.”

“Who now?”

“Oh, that’s right you haven’t met him. He is the barber surgeon of the mercenary company that accompanied our caravan to Whitestone. Big man, but you would like him, he is always fiddling around with that broken spy glass of his and is currently without an employer so I recruited him. Anyway, he knows his business and a competent healer is always an asset.”

Pike is done checking her saddle bags and smiles up at Percy.

“Give a girl a hand, handsome?”

Percy kneels, providing his knee as a steeping stool as Pike puts her right foot into the stirrup and clambers upwards into the saddle.

“Finally.” She grins at him, widely, gently cups his face in her hands as he rises, brushing dirty snow of the shins of his trousers and pulls him forward to rub her nose against his.

“You look … preoccupied. Everything all right?”

Percy is nervously thrumming his fingers against his legs.

“I need your wisdom, Pike. I’m at the end of my tether.”

The gnome sighs quietly and combs her hand through his hair.

“I’m afraid I picked up most of my ancient, arcane insights from farmer’s almanacs in the outhouses of the tavern’s Grog and I used to frequent…”

“Used to?”

“… still frequent.” Pike gives him a reproachful look. “It’s not nice to contradict a lady.”

 

Percy cannot suppress the sudden swell of happiness in his chest, the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Pike’s eyes are dark cobalt blue of a bottomless glacier lake in summer, her lashes impossible long and fine on her flushed cheeks, when she suddenly lowers her gaze.

“I shall remember that in case I ever meet one.”

Pike grins and slugs him in the shoulder. “Damn straight. If you could hold your drink worth shit, I would take you for a night or three of debauchery Trickfoot-style. You really will have to work on that, pretty boy. Right now I’m appalled and ashamed to be associated with you. Get your ass in gear you lightweight.”

Percy raises an eyebrow. “Is that a challenge?”

Pike shudders in mock horror. “Oh gods, no. Vex will have my hide if I bring you home sloshed, we can’t despoil your innocence.”

“That’s not a word that should be used in the same sentence with me. Or the same paragraph for that matter.”

Pike smile fades as she shakes her head. “I disagree sweet boy. I think in some ways you might be the most innocent of us all.”

Percy snorts half-amused, half-startled. “Did Grog hit you on the head again during sparing?”

Pike sighs quietly. “What did you want to ask me?”

Percy opens his mouth but finds the carefully honed words gone, his mind blank and his tongue unable to shape words, until finally they come tumbling out of his mouth raw and honest, with edges like broken glass.

“Did you find them? The books I send you for.”

Pike leans back in the saddle and eyes him carefully. “The abbot said that access to the lapis lazuli archives is only given to the most proven and trusted of the cobald order, but he agrees that the archives are in danger with the chaos and the plundering in Westron. He send one of his monks along to talk to you, maybe you can work something out?

Why do you want them so badly?”

Percy goes quiet, trying to order his thoughts, spinning madly in circles like a runaway wagon wheel.

“I have been … I have read that there are certain spells that return lost souls to the world weave, even without a body and …”

Percy gasps for air, at the edge of hyperventilating.

Pike’s face darkens in understanding and lightly closes her small, strong hand around his throat, tilting his head back.

“Breathe, Percival. Look at me and breath. Good boy.”

The iron bands squeezing his chest relax and his breathing evens out, the grey at the edges of his vision recedes to show Pike’s worried gaze.

Percy gives her his best charming ballroom smile. “I’m okay now, Pike. You can let got now.”

“Are you sure? We can go to our room, delaying my departure for an hour or two won’t make a difference.”

“I’m fine. Pike, the stable boys …”

“The stable boys can go hang. Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Pike sighs, lets go of his neck and rests her hand on his cheek briefly.

“We will find a way baby-boy, either with the Cobald Reserve or the temples in Vasselheim or somewhere else. We will find a way, so I swear by the dawnlight.”

Strong little finger cup his chin and tilt his face up. “Just remember, if you go all noble self-sacrifice on us, I swear to Sarenrae, I’ll take a leather strap to your bottom until you can’t sit right for a week.” Her kiss is hard and bruising with more than a hint of teeth and leaves them both breathless.

“Talk to Vex, baby-boy. If you can’t tell me what is on your mind, tell her. She feels that something is wrong and it makes her unhappy.  You both need to talk.”

She takes the rains of her mule and is about to spur it forward when Percy experiences a sudden spike of either bravery or cowardice, he isn’t quite sure which, and asks.

“If you have an impossible choice, what do you pick?”

Pike pauses and thinks for a second then shrugs. “Hard to answer without context. Whatever makes me happier, I guess.”

Percy snorts disbelievingly. “Liar.”

That gets her attention.

“Excuse me?”

“Liar. You are such a liar and a bad one at that. You always put other people first and this is what you are trying to sell to me? Not even Scanlan could make that work.”

Pike pauses eyebrows scrunched in thought. “I don’t think I am. I’m a simple girl, Percy, me and Grog are similar in this manner. I want my family happy, Grandpa Willhand, Grog the big lummox, our smiling girl … and you blue-eyes. There is very little I wouldn’t do for these people.  Seeing them happy makes me happy so it’s not selfless.”

She punches his shoulder hard. “Don’t call me a liar, you hear?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Pike nudges her animal forward, gently pulling on tether of the pack animals.

“I’m already late to meet Grog and our guide, so see you in a few days.”

Percy waves and calls after her. “Safe journey and don’t get frost-bite on your ass.”

Pike makes a rude hand gesture as she disappears under the portcullis, calling over her shoulder

“Talk to Vex.”


End file.
